Taking a Stand Against AI in Writing: A Writer's Perspective

I’ve had to rethink my ideas about Artificial Intelligence. I have made a monk-like commitment to never use artificial intelligence in my writing. I took this solemn vow after I was asked if I used AI in my writing. I don’t think that the person who asked the question realised what an insult that was, as they went on to say how great AI is. Apparently, the company he works at uses it when they have to write a letter that is difficult (difficult, remember that word). Apparently, you tell it what you want it to say, and it spits out a hundred different versions.

I read a post on social media where an author stated that finding the right wording for a section was proving difficult, so they used AI for a little bit of help and to write it for them.

Enter the Belgian cyclist Femke Van den Driessche, a competitor in the 2016 UCI Cyclo-cross world championships. What’s cycling got to do with AI? I hear you ask. Well, she was banned for six years after it was discovered that she had a little electric motor installed on her bike. Was she using it for a little bit of help on the difficult bits? she says no, but others say she did. There’s a word for it and that word is ‘cheating’. I view the use of AI in writing to be the same thing.

It's the thin end of the wedge as far as I’m concerned. A bit of help on a difficult sentence here, becomes a bit of help on a difficult paragraph, and so on. If I am struggling to phrase a paragraph, I work it out, I write out the sloppy version and refine it, that’s called editing. If I used AI, how would I ever improve?

But.

I have Safari open all the time when I am writing, to check facts and do general research, and it won’t be long before all search engines have an AI backbone – if they haven’t got one already. Its use will be impossible to avoid. So my position now is that I will never use AI to generate any actual text.

My hope is that the lack of AI in writing will become a selling point, an indication that everything on the page has come from the mind of a human and not generated by a machine.

I will certainly state the lack of AI in my writing, and I will state it loudly and proudly.

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