When Did Good Writing Become Suspicious?

AI. Artificial Intelligence. Interesting the feelings those two words provoke. 

Currently, it has a negative reputation. Despite being people’s guilty little pleasure. It is used for anything from simple search summaries to making office tasks easier, to best sellers. If some people are to be believed. 

I see both the bad and the good in it. I can see how helpful it can be in mundane office tasks, such as email. I know people in high tech who receive 800 emails a day. Due to the nature of their positions in a corporate culture of constant check-ins. Using AI can free up a lot of time in their day…for more meetings. 

On the other end of the spectrum, we have the YouTube CEO kicking off the new year with an open letter about shutting down channels with “AI slop.” Channels that are low effort and use AI for a quick buck. The examples range from repetitive stories to borderline slanderous entertainment news to meditation sites with either AI slide shows and music or just sounds.

I think many of us have come across these channels with no pictures, just sound, for hours, and see the millions of views. One can’t help but wonder how much money the channel is making with so little effort. But the truth is, I clicked on them. The soft sound of rain helped in settling at bedtime, especially as a parent trying to put a small child down after a number of bedtime stories. 

Aside from YouTube’s crackdown, there is an overall negative feeling. People worry that AI is taking over and taking jobs. Concerns about what the facilities do  to the environment and community resources. All those concerns are valid and need to be discussed. 

However, what bothers me more is what is happening in the writing community. What concerns me is the scrunity the writers are being put under. It is becoming way too easy to accuse people of using AI to write their class papers, short stories, or even a full novel. To be clear, I do not agree with people who use a prompt to write articles or class papers.  However, I do feel we should be careful in being so quick to accuse people based on their use of ellipses or Em Dashes.  

Even grammar and spell-check programs are becoming suspect among college professors. I can’t tell you what a setback that is for anyone with dyslexia who has spent an hour trying to get spell check to recognize what word you mean. When you can’t hear a certain sound correctly, spelling is highly affected.  I wonder if text-to-speech is being counted as part of that as well?

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Authors are being accused of using AI to write their best-selling books. I am not talking about some 5-page self-published book on Amazon, but rather popular self-published novels. I recently came across a story about an author who had a best-selling self-published book that was offered a deal by a major publishing house.  That author’s dreams were dashed as people didn’t uplift them or offer congratulations, but instead tore into their book, accusing them of having AI write it. The author lost the book deal despite her claims that she did not use AI to write it.

While I think all of us who are writers and storytellers do not want AI to take over our craft.  I find some of the things people use to accuse authors and writers are things we were taught in school and later in college.  Yes, I am referring to em dashes and ellipses. 

In addition, the use of three adjectives in a sentence. If you could write a paper with three adjectives with the proper punctuation, you would be on track for a good grade when I went to school.  

Then there are comments about an “overall pattern”.  Yes, there is something to writers having a distinctive style, even AI.  Maybe the writer likes certain adjectives, constructs sentences in a distinctive way, or has a signature phrase; AI is accused of doing the comparative “it’s not this, it’s that.” 

I mentioned style patterns because one of the main “identifiers” is repetition. However, the tendency to repeat things despite your style is not unique to AI. I have read self-published authors before the accessibility of AI. Where they wrote two sentences, sometimes two paragraphs, two different ways, conveying the same sentiment. Yet, they decided to include both of them in their book. That isn’t AI, it’s an author liking their prose while simultaneously making the case for experienced book editors. 

Now we get to the archenemy of AI: the AI detector app. Colleges are relying on them and so is the public in their scrunity of authors. They rely on patterns and specific uses of certain grammatical punctuation.  However, their accuracy rates are all over the board, ranging from 17% to 85%.  

My question is, if they are trained on the same writing models as AI, then I have to wonder if they would not find AI in everything? Which is what happened when a few of these apps were tested with books written before the computer age. The detectors found AI in all of them.  

What they don’t take into consideration is intent or how they were meant to be used, if used at all. As I said earlier, the dyslexic’s need it for spelling and grammar help.

This is not the first time Tech has messed with our writing norms. Microsoft made a decision decades ago that has since changed millions of people’s views on the usage of “alot” vs “a lot”.   

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My seventh-grade English teacher would have some things to say about that, as he did when he introduced it. I remember him telling our class, “Don’t let anyone tell you you’re wrong for writing “alot” as one word. It is acceptable. 

All that to say, we are letting tech dictate how we treat each other in the writing community.  In all the scrunity one thing that came out as the ultimate decider was that the writing was considered “wooden”.  All I can say is “OUCH!” At that point, I hoped it was AI because that felt like salt in the wound.  

That is the problem, we are using AI as the ultimate writer insult. You are telling someone you are not only a bad writer but also incapable of writing a comprehensive story.  Can you imagine dismissing someone who uses spell check because they didn’t look up each word in the dictionary? 

Again, I am not defending low effort; give a prompt, AI writes a story, sell a book.  But I am saying that authors are at different levels of this craft. We would all be worse off if any one creative were to hold back from writing their novel, article, or story due to fear of scrunity not on the merits of the story, but if they used a form of AI to help polish it. 

If anything, all the accusations of AI use make the point of the importance of human oversight, at the high school and collegiate levels.  Along with the importance of a human editor’s touch at major publications and publishing houses.  Editors use their experience to take in a person’s style, voice, and “patterns” to bring out the author’s story in the best light. This is part of the deal if you get a book deal or work for a major publication. However, not for the self-published author. 

Self-publishing has made it easier for people to share their ideas and their creative stories in one form or another.  Unfortunately, not everyone can afford a human editor, so they use an AI model as a tool to edit their book. Is their spelling and grammar acceptable? Is the story consistent? Then blasted for it and told they sound hollow.  In my mind, I am happy they are using some sort of editor. 

I wonder, maybe instead of tearing down these novelists and writers, we should be teaching people how to use the tool. How to protect their voices and their unique sentence structure when using these tools.  What the AI is based on to understand their edit suggestions.  What to say to make sure it knows what kind of piece it is editing.  If you have ever been stuck with no one around to bounce an idea off or find the right phrase, AI can be a good tool.  It should not be a replacement for ideas and the creative drive of anyone. But we also shouldn’t be vilifying people who use it to share their creative ideas or finish one of three papers for three different classes.  

Because when we get this wrong, it’s not just about a paper or a book. It can affect a student’s future or a writer’s livelihood.

I am curious to hear your thoughts on AI, I hope you share them in the comments below.