AI For Writers
Oh my. AI. Shame on me, but I only recently learned about ChatGPT and a host of other places a writer can go to have a machine write their story for them. Ha! In my day job as a brand strategist this opens up all kinds of opportunities, I suppose. A colleague said she was using it to help her re-work pitch decks. I think I might try it for SEO. But as someone who writes fiction, it was somewhat alarming to learn that you could have a natural language processing tool write a book for you in three days.
So, where is this all going? This year I met a really charming (and genius) young man who is leading a digital marketing company and championing the advent of Virtual Influencers. You guessed it, they will be driven by AI technology. So, now the “people” we follow for inspiration and advice will be machines? Their first influencer on TikTok is called Zero. Watch this space.
On the other hand, a friend of mine is an AI poet, artist and researcher. I’ve watched her transition from fashion PR maven to acclaimed artist in this emerging milieu. According to her bio, her work fuses elements of poetry, art, code, AI digital humanities and web3 creativity to probe what it means to be human in a posthuman era. I’ve been thoroughly sucked in, tracking her public appearances as she champions the future of art.
Do you find any of this confusing? I do. As writers and artists are we meant to dismiss the rigor that makes our work better? Case in point from Quillbot, a paraphrasing tool: QuillBot's suite of tools employs cutting-edge AI technology in order to make writing painless. Founded on the belief that learning and applying knowledge is more important than the mechanical aspects of writing, QuillBot seeks to automate these necessary tasks intending to augment your language. Now, you can focus on what you write, not how you should write it.
Sorry, how you write is as important as what you write.
Still, I am extremely curious. I believe we would all be a bit foolish to think we don’t need theologians, philosophers and ethicists in the ring, along with the coders and builders, to ensure that what was meant for good doesn’t take a turn for the worse.
Phillip K. Dick, author of “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep,” famously said in his 1972 speech “The Android and the Human” - In a very real sense our environment is becoming alive, or at least quasi-alive, and in ways specifically and fundamentally analogous to ourselves... Rather than learning about ourselves by studying our constructs, perhaps we should make the attempt to comprehend what our constructs are up to by looking into what we ourselves are up to
Here is a short list of places you can go to either learn more or get help writing using AI.
ChatGPT is a natural language processing tool driven by AI technology that allows you to have human-like conversations and much more with the chatbot.
Generative AI platform for writers.
AI novel writing assistant built by writers for writers.
Paraphrasing tool.