On AI wronging and writing
I hate AI writing and can spot it in a second. It’s not just the excess of one-line paragraphs, the contrasty “not that, but this” argument constructions, the excessive use of em dashes. It’s a tone that sounds like the average of a million well-put hunks of text published by competent writers of opinion columns and advertising copy. In other words, a lot like my own writing.
AI writing is AutoTune for the human kind.
Also (again like my own writing), AI writing is good, but not good enough. Unless you’re Shakespeare, Vonnegut, or McPhee, writing can always be better. If you use AI to write, be sure to re-write it. Seriously.
Like most people who research and write for a living today, I make heavy use of ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini. I am also a paying customer for two of them. While I may not like all their writing, I like their help with—
- Research on anything
- Any health issue that takes longer to explain than the five minutes my doctors give me once a year
- Tech support
For example, ChatGPT last week helped me get two laptops to connect with two difficult peripherals (a printer and a batch photo scanner) at my sister’s house, and to expose the inadequacies of the software tools involved (such as Epson’s crap scanning tools, and a sneaky feature in Apple’s Image Capture that pretends a saved (and presumably uncompressed) TIFF scan was not a wrapper on a compressed JPEG one. (The file sizes were small and identical.)
And now it’s helping me write my next book. More on that later.
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