The AI-augmented writer
I’m digging into the data from our survey of 1500 writers regarding AI and the Writing Profession. While the analysis is far from complete, this much is clear:
- Writers who use AI to help them do their work are more successful.
- Writers who use AI to write are less successful.
Simply put, AI-augmented writers succeed.
I am continually amazed at the ways in which AI is helping me, from doing data analysis, to identifying writing problems, to capturing the right voice, to choosing exactly the right word. AI saves me time and makes my writing better (and from what I’ve seen in the survey, I’m hardly alone in this).
But in addition to the fact that AI-generated writing is not copyrightable, it tends to suck. It tends to be repetitive, clichéd, soulless, shallow, inaccurate, and tedious to read. That’s the definition of slop.
AI is a great writing assistant.
AI is not even a good writer.
And that makes all the difference.
Do you think it’s possible/likely that AI will become truly good at writing? If that happens, should writers use it? In most cases, I don’t want to read AI output, however fluent. It’s important to me that words read came from a person’s mind, not a stochastic parrot.
Josh, my clients and colleagues and I often disagree about this question. AI will become better, but I believe it will always lack the human quality that makes writing worth reading. But there are certainly lots of people who believe the opposite.