What goes through a writer’s brain? Readers’ letters and dispatches from the wide world of writing
STAR LETTER
ARGUING WITH AI
My thanks to Writing Magazine for continuing to be a strong voice of caution for writers when it comes to the use of AI. Gary Dalkin and Piers Blofeld’s pieces in this month’s issue were great reads, and while the thought of AI becoming one of the ‘norms’ in writing is bleak, it’s encouraging to imagine a world that gets fed up of it and fights back with raw, human writing.
I was frustrated recently when a member of my online writing group asked for a new channel to be started called ‘writing with AI’, where he explained through a series of online presentations that AI can be used ethically to improve our writing. I watched with shock and growing concern when a handful of others in our group seemed open to his ideas. He used ChatGPT to generate plot ideas, name his characters, set scenes, and it even started writing paragraphs for him. He then continued to write and get the AI to give him feedback as he went along. Despite myself and others pointing out that he had a community of human writer friends he could rely on, he instead insisted that we were all just afraid of technology and that AI was the next evolution for writers. But most frustrating of all was his claim that he’s not actually getting the AI to write anything for him. I think it’s a sad state of affairs when a writer disregards the planning and brainstorming stage as nothing more than a boring task that they’d rather get a machine to do.
But Writing Magazine gave me hope in another way. I recently started getting shortlisted for your regular writing contests (woo hoo!), the first being the recent Experiment contest. My story was presented as a conversation between a writer and an AI, with the writer trying to get ‘Chatbot’ to write him the winning entry for the WM contest. Of course, the AI fails miserably.
But then I thought I’d try a new experiment; I signed up for ChatGPT, copied and pasted my shortlisted story into it and asked the AI to give me a critical review and to rate the story out of 10. The AI hated the story. It claimed there was a lack of character development, the idea was ill-executed, the writing had several grammatical issues and it didn’t understand the jokes in the slightest. My first Writing Magazine shortlisted story earned a ChatGPT rating of 2/10.
If that doesn’t give AI enthusiasts pause for thought, I don’t know what will. CHRIS MORRIS Dundee
