For my issue, I have chosen to research the role and use of AI in writing. Now, use of AI in writing software isn’t new: even the most primitive of spell check (irony, I just wrote that as speelcheck) software utilises a basic AI system to check for correct spellings and inflection. Grammarly had cornered the market for years when it came to souped-up versions of this very idea, and seemed very high-tech at the time. However, with the recent explosive advancements in the fields of AI learning tools, it seems like every day there are new ways to check your spelling, rephrase your sentences and, if all else fails, just have the computer write your story for you.
As an artistic person, it’s hard not to panic at that last suggestion. I see in my mind images of robots re-writing Shakespeare: Midsummer Night's RAM, MACbeth, Much Ado About Coding…
Fundamentally- I hope, I haven’t done the research yet- I understand that the issue is not within robots taking over the jobs of real, actual writers, because although art created by AI is novel, it can’t replace a human- right?
I want to explore and discover the different ways AI tools can help writers, and discover, ultimately, if there is any truly safe, ethical use of AI that can genuinely help professionals advance in their field.

What does ai do for writers?

Look online now, and there are so many AI writing tools that, when searching on chrome, the phrase ‘AI tools to…’ autofills with ‘help with writing’. If you search on chrome, the first four tools suggested to me were also, interestingly, sponsored. Clicking around, there seems to be a few broad categories for these tools to fall into- most offer either some sort of ‘rewriting tool’, where you type in what you plan on publishing and they change around the phrasing, or a sort of ‘generating content tool’. The ‘generating content’ type seems to be the sort that people are more morally opposed to. These websites tell you that they can generate a blog post, slogan or company name for you, which you are then meant to ‘edit’. Firstly, the thing that stood out to me was the ‘blog post’ claim- at least in part because I didn’t know people still wrote blogs. But, apparently, people are out in the universe wanting the computer to write their opinions for them. I think my opinion on this one boils down to ‘if you hate writing blogs so much, why have one?’ The answer is money, I assume. I don’t know how much, but there must be something in the chat-GPT blog post market. However, my issues with this concept are not purely artistic.
PUT HERE Like AAA, most of these writing tools have a major issue with false information. This issue comes from a common misconception about AI: it does not come up with information that is correct, but information that sounds correct. It often hallucinates citations and statistics, because it knows that this is the sort of thing that an article will have, without actually finding the statistic that really corresponds to what it claims. In fact, a recent study found that chat-GPT, the champion of AI writing tools, was incorrect 52% of the time when asked the answers to common questions.
While I personally don’t believe that this means AI should be banned from blogs, it all serves as a cautionary tale against relying on it for generating factual information in its own right. I personally think AI works best at creating an outline of what a post could look like, before a human comes to fill in the details.
As well as this, I don’t consider it wrong to have AI take over some tasks when it comes to administerial work. For example, a lot of these tools also tout their AI email-writing capabilities. I dislike writing emails. If a computer is made to write something that already doesn’t pass the Turing test, is that wrong? Should it be a uniquely human burden, debating whether ‘best wishes’ is better than ‘take care’?
Again, use with caution, but I wouldn’t say there’s anything wrong with that, provided you then check over what's been written and edit liberally.
Still, we’re mostly talking about business, here. Obviously, AI isn’t writing fiction novels, right?
Right?