Here’s a little infuriating story for you.
I wrote something. An article. It was thoroughly researched, written in an appropriate tone that didn’t stray far from my own personal style; 800 words of my own thoughts articulated in the exact way they come jumbled up in my brain. Out of curiosity, I ran the work through an AI detector and I was told that this article, of which I still had the hand-strewn plans on pieces of A4 paper in front of me, was 68% likely to be written by AI.
I blinked in incredulity, horror, and anger.
Not because the result meant anything — I knew it was bullshit because I was there when I wrote it myself (without the help of AI, thank you) — but because of what this means for creatives. What really did bother me was seeing the sentences and paragraphs that were highlighted as most likely AI-generated. What does this mean? Is the average person terrible at stringing together coherent sentences? Am I being flagged because I know more words than the type of person who asks ChatGPT to write an essay for them? Also, how dare you claim my work as yours?
It is ridiculous to me because I’m sure in many creative jobs there is a stipulation for work to not be AI-generated — as there should be — but I would be shocked if this was measured using one of these dud AI detectors. Most-likely written by AI when the sole job of AI is to scour what has alreadybeen written and create an amalgamation of information and personal styles that already exist. In order for AI to work, it has to use exemplar writing and I’m sure there’s a bank of information ChatGPT is using. To then flip it on the writers to say they are using AI rather than the other way around is ridiculous.
No, thank you. In fact, I am dejected at the thought of people using AI to write essays and blogs, books even. It’s quite terrifying to me that, perhaps somewhere in the future, there could be entire books written in a specific person’s style, all done by AI.
Terrible time to be a creative. I just hope we are able to really drive home the need for authenticity.
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