Artificial intelligence is a hot topic these days. Although AI has been discussed for years (and speculated about in science fiction long before it even existed), its prevalence in the news is arguably more pronounced than ever as it is integrated into our lives.
I’ve been keeping up, more or less, with discussions across all industries. But of course I am especially paying attention to how it is impacting the writing world.
From professors posting about students submitting essays written by Chat-GPT (without instructor permission and in fact in clear defiance of it) and the necessity of software to combat it, to other professors encouraging its use in their courses and even requiring it, to a literary journal temporarily halting submissions for consideration because so many of them were clearly written by AI. And these are just some of the present-day concerns; there is also the issue of how this will affect the future of authorship and publishing as we know it.
To be clear, I’m not entirely anti-AI. I try not to issue wholesale dismissals of things; after all, many things have both pros and cons. And I even use AI fairly often these days—never for writing, but for auto-transcription of the interviews that I conduct. It saves me time and usually money too, then I just go back in and fill in the bits that AI missed or got wrong. Recently though I’d say its accuracy has consistently been over 90%. But I’m also scared about the implications of AI vis-à-vis creativity (across all art forms, which includes writing). I will say that AI lacks a soul, and the soul is something that cannot be replicated. But as the algorithms become smarter over time, will we even be able to tell the difference?
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