As a someone who does most of his writing on paper first and then transfers it onto the 1s and 0s we see on the screen, its not hard to imagine my stance on artificial intelligence and writing (against it if that wasn’t clear). If it hasn’t been made perfectly clear, I am a (self-proclaimed) poet, and the one thing about poetry that I adore is the ability to pour one’s heart and soul into the lines (not that you can’t do that in prose). Poetry, I believe, is one of the art forms that requires the human touch. I’ve seen AI programs attempt to create poems and what comes out is nothing less of hollow, shallow and derivative. No matter what prompt you put in, no matter what author you command it to emulate, that’s all it will create, an imitation.

That being said, I do agree with the notion that AI Programs can help us surpass the notion of writers block. Sometimes our words have a tendency to stall and get stuck in our minds. Katy Ilonka Gero brought up a great point in her article of using theses AI programs as “drafting buddies”. That’s why we cherish our peers, and their opinions, their feedback, their minds. And who wouldn’t love to have them on call, 24/7. The accessibility of AI is unmatched, but so is its superficiality. As Rodolfo Delgado writes in his article “As writers, our distinct voices and authenticity are what draw people in”.(Delgado) I mentioned to Cindy and Tyler during our Conversation Café that my love for the field of English is the various perspective that everyone brings to the table. The ways in which they view the material and (most important) their own experiences that is woven in their responses. These AI programs can’t take into account how the text brought up memories and emotions, they cant emulate the genuine human experience.

Another aspect you lose is the sense of accomplishment. “The achievement of landing the end of a scene may only come from struggling to do it yourself”(Gero). Its the Eureka moment, that feeling that you’ve transgressed the problem at hand, you’ve found the write word, or created the perfect sentence to express your ideas. I recently wrote an essay for Language of Racial and Ethnic Identity (ENG 5155) comparing the long history of laws making insiders, U.S citizen of different races, religion and class, feel foreign to that of the popular video game The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim which does the same with its fantastical races of Orcs, elves, and others. After submitting it, I felt it only right to allow my friend group who have also played the game to read it. Their feedback on my writing made me feel such accomplishment and dispelled most doubts I had. It wasn’t just superficial comments like “yeah it was good” or ” I liked it”. They started quoting passages and giving me commentary on my writings. (Not all of them are English majors or graduates. One is an English teacher, one is in the nursing field and the other is in the pharmaceutical field) This is what AI cannot recreate, sure it can find where I misplaced a comma or I misspelled a word but to engage with the writing and explain where it can be developed, that is out of its reach. That is what cannot be written into code.

The next thing I would like to focus on is intent behind the usage of AI. We’re focusing our view of its usage to writing academically but there are other more malicious ways of using it. As is mentioned in the Vox piece “Researchers have shown that these models can be used to flood government websites with fake public comments about policy proposals, post tons of fake business reviews, argue with people online, and generate extremist and racist posts that can make fringe opinions seem more popular than they really are”(Vox). The voice of one can be made to seem like the voice of thousands. With its ever growing usage it’s hard for the common man to decipher the writings of Bots, especially when its coming from several accounts. It gets more detrimental when people fail to investigate what they are reading. AI bots can and have been used to spread misinformation and ultimately influence the masses who fail to investigate further. But can we solely blame the AI for this or do we blame its creators? This leads us to think about who is programming these AI systems. How their prejudices have, consciously or unconsciously, infiltrated their creations.

What up everyone! Welcome to another episode of the T-Money Show. Today’s guest is a subject of fierce debate. Friend of humans or trying to overthrow us? Please welcome Artificial Intelligence, AI!

First, we will be looking at a Youtube video  Computers Just Got a Lot Better at Writing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gcHkxP9adiM. The main takeaway from this video is that AI is getting much much much better at writing. This means that detecting things written by AI is becoming much harder. AI models can be trained to write in any style about any subject. The more creators learn about how AI learns, the smarter they can make the AI. How crazy is it that AI teaching pedagogy is a real thing. Instead of studying how students learn, we will start to study how computers learn and how to teach them. What a world!

In the next article AI Reveals the Most Human Parts of Writing: Katy Ilonka Gero https://www.wired.com/story/artificial-intelligence-writing-art/, Gero looks at the areas where AI can be useful in writing. This article was refreshing in that the author lists the different steps of the writing process: planning, drafting, and revising and where we can use AI to help. Instead of Gero saying AI = bad for writing, she looks at the parts of the writing process that are fun and rewarding versus the parts that are tedious and boring. Gero concludes that revision is an area where AI can be useful. 

In my writing, I use Grammarly which is a real-time spelling and grammar checking AI. The thing that separates Grammarly from a normal spell checker is that it analyzes your writing in real-time and offers suggestions on how to reorganize a sentence to make it more coherent and the text of your overall tone. The last part is interesting because AI is able to predict with a good degree of accuracy the feelings and emotions in your text. This means AI is learning what writing equals what emotions and it will be able to do the same in time. They say that emotional writing is one of the things that is a tell tale sign of human writing, but in the future, AI and human writing will be much harder to tell apart.

The final article, The Risk Of Losing Unique Voices: What Is The Impact Of AI On Writing? By Rodolfo Delgado https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbesbusinesscouncil/2023/07/11/the-risk-of-losing-unique-voices-what-is-the-impact-of-ai-on-writing/?sh=5d85b9b44db6 reminds us that whenever we use AI, we should be mindful that we don’t lose the human touch in our writing. He says that whenever he uses AI, he always has a human look over the writing to have the last word. This ensures that the piece of writing does not lose the human element. This makes sense because if something is too perfect it can be off putting. Especially in a setting where you are trying to sell something to an audience. Emotional reactions are one of the best ways to sell a product. In my last paragraph, I mentioned how AI is learning to write with human emotions, but AI still can’t understand how to effectively provoke certain emotional reactions in humans. Even if you can’t tell at first glance that something was written by AI, you will still have different emotional reactions when reading a piece written by AI versus written by a human.

When I was very young, I sometimes watched Family Feud on TV with my family. I would yell out my answer and wait anxiously to see whether it was on the board. At that young age, I did not understand that the idea was to give the answer that most other people would also give. As I grew older, I came to understand that in order to succeed at Family Feud, I would have to come up with the most mediocre, least inspired answers. In Katy Ilonka Gero’s article, she discusses a TV writer who needed her work to be highly original and thought AI might help her to avoid a generic ending: “[T]he computer’s ideas would represent a low bar that the writer must improve on” (Paragraph 6). This makes sense, since AI is programmed to identify the word choice, syntax, and other patterns that are most common and emulate them, not produce something wildly different. That TV writer is striving to avoid what I am calling the “Family Feud effect,” which is the most average result possible. I worry about the “Family Feud effect” becoming widespread if AI is embraced too readily by writers.

In “AI Reveals the Most Human Parts of Writing,” Gero points out that writing is a challenging pursuit: “Figuring out how a poem should end is difficult….” (Paragraph 7). Gero’s article suggests that AI can help writers get past writer’s block because “[t]his is literally the task most computer systems are trained to do: predict what comes next” (Paragraph 8). Using AI in this way would certainly make things easier for struggling writers; AI might become a tool that every writer uses, just like a computer. But the danger here is that when there is a tool that makes a task easier, people will gravitate to it, get used to it, and soon be unable to imagine life without it. Writers will grow increasingly dependent upon AI. Is this a desirable outcome? In “The Risk Of Losing Unique Voices: What Is The Impact Of AI On Writing?” Delgado describes the writing he produced entirely with AI as writing in which his “unique voice,” his “essence,” his “humanity” all “seemed to have been brushed aside” (Paragraph 3). This is not a desirable outcome, and Delgado consequently cautions us to use AI “judiciously” (Paragraph 12).Delgado thinks that AI is not always the answer, and Gero points out that there can be joy in doing difficult things (Paragraph 7), but I just don’t believe that most writers will be able to resist the temptation to overuse AI. I expect that, soon enough, we will be living with the “Family Feud effect,” a reality where people are choosing the easiest path–the one leading to mediocrity. Gero says that “[t]he achievement of landing the end of a scene may only come from struggling to do it yourself” (Paragraph 7). If all struggling writers eventually succumb and turn to AI for assistance, they may never “land” their ideas. I believe that the struggle contributes to the work, and I want my writing to be in my own voice and contain humanity. I will count myself among the struggling rather than turn to AI and miss out on that accomplishment

How would you feel if I told you that an AI was writing my blog #7? Just kidding, it is I, human Cindy. I don’t know about you guys, but artificial intelligence scares the living life out of me. The mere thought of machines having a thought process and making decisions for us, sends shivers up my spine. I am also a believer that robots will take over the world someday and all of mankind will be desolate. 

Anyways, today we will be talking about an article by Katy Ilonka Gero called, “AI Reveals the Most Human Parts of Writing” and a Forbes article called “The Risk Of Losing Unique Voices: What Is The Impact Of AI On Writing?” by Rodolfo Delgado. Both of these articles play hand in hand when it comes to discussing the pros and cons of AI used for writers. We have Katy Ilonka Gero’s article where she implements her understanding of AI within the world of writing. She says AI can help writers feel less judged when having their work revised, but also help come up with new ideas whenever they are having writer’s block. I picked up on an interesting quote by Katy,  “ Some writers think workshopping with a computer might be akin to talking to yourself, in that it’s private and feels internal, that it might not feel like someone else is in the room”. I feel as if I am being too judgemental in this post but I personally would not want to talk to a computer just so I don’t feel judged. As writers, we are bound to get critiqued and we will have to be bred to handle rejection. Writer’s everyday go through some sort of rejection, and yes it absolutely sucks but I don’t think resorting to AI is the best option.  

This brings me to my next point of authenticity. People feel connected to books and stuff they read because it is relatable and portrays a sense of emotion through words. How can a computer ever be able to understand what it feels like to understand grief, heartbreak, adventure, excitement, let alone write about it. The article “The Risk Of Losing Unique Voices: What Is The Impact Of AI On Writing?” by Rodolfo Delgado discusses the cons of having AI in the world of writing. He wrote “As a writer, I understand the value of growing and improving through feedback. AI tools, while excellent for quick edits and grammar checks, cannot provide the nuanced feedback that a human editor can. They don’t understand the subtleties of tone, the art of storytelling or the emotions that tie a piece together”. Sometimes when I am writing a blog for my other class that uses WordPress, I must follow a set of guidelines. For example my Readability should be at a green as well as my SEO. Most of the time my SEO will be at an Orange color meaning the blog post is alright. So you’re telling me just because I have too many words in one sentence, my post sucks? I would rather my peer or mentor revise my work for me and suggest that I shorten my sentences. At least I would be able to ask questions and get a better understanding that my idea should be broken up into two sentences.

I just feel like writers get a lot of backlash for never being authentic enough or that people have read similar pieces elsewhere. But, if our work is now made by computers, how do we know they are not producing the same exact thing for someone else? Will our writings of mental health and grief be coming from a place where someone has experienced it? Artificial intelligence is definitely an important topic to discuss, because this is our future. Who knows, maybe an AI actually wrote this blog post….. 

I would like to preface this post by saying that I am militantly against the use of artificial intelligence for the purpose of writing anything, whether it be fiction or nonfiction. And that is not just because I once accused Chat GPT of trying to eat humans and it replied by saying that it could not eat humans because it has no mouth. Like what? Is that supposed to make me feel better? Anyhow, the real reason why I oppose the use of A.I. for the purpose of writing is that it strips away the soul of a form of art that is uniquely human. At the moment, thankfully, A.I. writing is generally needlessly verbose, uninteresting, and riddled with various errors; but I fear that one day it could surpass the abilities of the best writers in history. Imagine if, in ten years, you could ask Chat GPT to write you an 1000 page epic fantasy written in the style of Dostoevsky and it could fulfill your request in minutes? What if it actually managed to incapsulate the style of Dostoevsky and could draw from the greatest works of literature of all time to develop one of the best books ever written ever? And what if you then asked for a ten-episode mini-series based off of that book with Nicholas Cage, Willem Dafoe, and Zendaya in it and in a few more minutes you’d be watching it on your device (with several interruptions for advertisements I’m sure)? At that point, we would have to truly ask ourselves what is the point? Why have authors, or film directors, or actors, or creative people at all? They would, essentially, be made useless and the heart of all of human culture would die. When I was a kid, I always figured that A.I. would one day replace the shitty jobs that people don’t want to do and leave everyone to pursue their creative interests, but now it seems like the opposite is true. It seems to me that, in the not too distant future, everyone will still be working soulless corporate jobs, while A.I. will rob humanity of its creative pursuits (which actually the subject of a short story I am writing coincidentally). Maybe I am being too pessimistic here and it isn’t really that big of a deal, but if we are on the verge of an actual singularity, I think that humanity should tread lightly. Once we open pandora’s box, I fear that we may not be able to close it again.

And this is the point in my blog post where I realize that I haven’t actually addressed either of the articles directly and just typed a giant paragraph full of rantings and ravings. So now, I would like to say that I actually found the first article, while very intriguing, to be underestimating the extent of the problem at hand. The author (or A.I. who really knows?) writes the following in regard to the usefulness of A.I. to overcome writer’s block: “Most writers, or really most people who have to write, know the feeling of a mind gone blank. The average writer trains themselves out of this fear, but no matter how many times you’ve put words on the page, you’re bound to encounter that moment when you don’t know what comes next. This is literally the task most computer systems are trained to do: predict what comes next” (Gero). There is no question that what the author said is true: writer’s block plagues all writers at one point or another and most of us would rather not have to deal with it. In my subjective experience, and I’m sure the experience of most writers, writer’s block isn’t typically a result of not knowing what to write but more so of not knowing how to write it. I might know the general plot points I would like to occur for instance but translating those ideas on paper (getting from point A to point B in a logical way that also sounds nice) is often the hard part. With that said, I don’t think that A.I. is the solution to this problem. People have been struggling with writer’s block for millennia, any you know what…maybe that’s okay. Maybe it’s okay to struggle and fail sometimes whether it be on a college essay or a novel you are working on. That’s what makes that book or essay meaningful: the fact that is wasn’t easy to create. You had to pour time and energy and love (or hatred) to piece it together and finally arrive at a finished product that you are proud of.

To help illustrate my point a little further, I have a friend who working on his Master’s degree in business and had to write a 15 page essay for a class. He turned in a 30 page essay written mostly by various A.I.’s and received a 100 despite the majority of it being incoherent and mind numbingly boring. How can someone genuinely be proud of that? Perhaps for some it doesn’t matter (it’s just one class after all) but even those who use A.I. would have to agree that–had they actually written the paper themselves– they would have an actual sense of achievement and pride.

Moving on to the second article, I found “The Risk Of Losing Unique Voices: What Is The Impact Of AI On Writing?” by Rodolfo Delgado to be more in line with my sentiments and general anxieties centered around the usage of A.I.. Like Delgado, I do not deny the vast potential of A.I. (although I am fearful of its capabilities to deceive and rob us of our humanity), but I think that it should generally be avoided by author’s who wish to preserve their unique voices. Delgado describes how he edited a previous article using artificial intelligence and that it revised his work in such a way that it was perfectly correct grammatically but has lost its ‘human side’. It may have made for an easy and straight forward read, but the passion behind his writing was gone and it was, therefore, less interesting. I think a connection can be made here to the banking concept in education from last week’s article. In the banking concept, the teacher inputs information into the student and gets a specific output and that is much like what an A.I. does. You feed it information (or it pulls information from the web), and generic responses are procedurally generated. Writing, in my opinion, should not sound procedural or clinical, instead it should come from the heart of the author and give insight into their unique viewpoint of the world. If we wish to avoid using our unique voices, then we should limit our usage of A.I. to a minimum.

The famous poet T.S. Elliot one wrote in his epic poem “The Wasteland”: “This is the way the world ends: not with a bang but a whimper”, and I very much think that he may have been on to something. Will A.I. rise up as blood thirsty robots and kills us all? I mean…yeah maybe…but I find it much more likely that the opposite will happen. It will kill us slowly and indirectly. It will invalidate our existence and make our history, our struggles, and our art meaningless. For this reason, I believe that we should be wary of it and proceed with extreme caution. By the time we realize that we have gone too far, it may be too late.

Note: In the spirit of preserving my humanity I will not be revising or editing this article…which is good because I rarely do that anyway.

Artificial Intelligence writing stories for people is something I am familiar with. I tested out an AI story writer a few years back during the quarantine mandate. It was a story about time travel and fighting an enemy throughout the timelines. I know, geeky, but I am a fan of sci-fi and fantasy, along with adventure, action, and other thrilling types of stories.

Although, I knew that I would never use AI to write my own stories for me. I don’t plagiarize and I write my own words. I’m never going to let someone else write for me, especially when that “someone” is a literal writing software with no sentience. As such, I am fully against the idea of using AI to write stories in lieu of human authors writing them themselves.

‘AI Reveals the Most Human Parts of Writing’ by Katy Ilonka Gero brings up an interesting point about writers’ control over their own works. I have had many experiences where I tried to write something, or started to write, only for writer’s block to stop me in my tracks, leaving the white page clear and dry. I understand why someone would consider going to an AI writing engine to whip up some good ideas, brainstorm word choices, fix grammar and sentence structure, and even just for fun. It’s a good thing to talk about the concerns that writers have with losing control over the trajectory of their own works. I feel like one of the biggest issues with AI writing is that it could make it harder for writers like me to come up with original ideas. The AI produces content from what it can find online and as a result none of the recommendations are unique or non-plagiarized. And as an aspiring fiction author and storywriter overall, I want to create my own content with the constructive feedback of human writers, not a computer.

Fellow classmates, Hello!!!

~ I apologize in advance for my little blog-post-of-a-rant. Ehh, do I really, though?

“We must strive to maintain the human touch in our writings, for it is our imperfections that make us relatable” (Delgado). This quote, right here, will drive all my thoughts behind this blog post. While reading Kathy Gero’s, AI Reveals the Most Human Parts of Writing and Rodolfo Delgado’s, The Risk of Losing Unique Voices: What is The Impact of AI on Writing? I was tinkering back and forth between the potential good and bad of artificial intelligence. But I feel the bad severely outweighs the good. I am nothing but a ball of fear, bouncing endlessly around a four-wall room, waiting patiently for a child to catch me midst motion and tell me that I still have purpose in their eyes. I fear for our future and for mankind, and I am not only speaking in terms of artificial intelligence. The little sense of hope I hold falls in this very quote, “Humans will always be far more interested in what a person has to say over a computer” (Gero). Let’s hope this is true as I know it is for me.

I really want to be on the side that roots for artificial intelligence. I want to view technology like my Tesla enthusiast, machine- hungry, mechanic brother who becomes animated over every little advancement. He views tech advancement as a product of human potential, which surely it is but to what extent? He can see the future with technology, as I simply cannot. He has hope and dreams of what it can be and become, while I fester over all the humans put a risk: all and every type of artist, and even middle-class workers whose jobs will be stripped away from them because it will be cheaper for our government to plop a robot in their place.

Undoubtedly, artificial intelligence is and will become a major component of human evolution, for it will be in our History books someday, stating how humanity attempted to elevate human consciousness, in hopes to transcend normal human consciousness to find the source off the all-knowing, divine consciousness that connects everyone to everything. But we are humans – somethings got to give. The human psychic apparatus is unfortunately not pure enough. The egotistical pull of human wants and desires for power and money combined with greed, ignorance, and the “I” or “self” chosen over the “we” will be our demise in this attempt to transcend the human species. In return, our creation will become our head of state.

Come on people; we’ve seen it before! This narrative is not new yet here we are debating whether the existence of AI is crucial or a menace to society. Traditionally this is how I see it: humans in the wake of technological advancement come together to create, form, and give birth to an artificial intelligence that’s created by man to support man. Although humanity is the creator of AI, are we all just turning a blind eye toward the possibility of being controlled by our own creation? The creation is currently en route, as there is no need to rent a DVD anymore; no need to drown in the depths of writers block; no need to feel lonely when the world-wide web is at your fingertips; no need to drive a damn car as self-driving cars are emerging left and right; and eventually, there will be no need to even have to think. There are so many Hollywood block buster movies that emphasize the egotistical mishaps that happen when humanity designs a creation far much greater than we can imagine. Take the movies I, Robot, Ex Machina, MEGAN, WALL-E, or Chappie as a few examples that spotlight highly intelligent robots created by man that fill public service positions throughout the world, leaving humans to do nothing but question their very existence.

So, I ask: to what extent do humans give up full control? We are climbing the latter toward submission of our own intelligence. And I am not willing to give up my authentic intelligence in our attempt to re-create the all-knowing, divine intelligence we all chase to find happiness. It is no secret that we write to understand the world around us and the thoughts that linger within our psyche. We write to create some sense of meaning because we are starving for purpose. And this sense of “purpose” can easily be taken away from us!

Let’s take Gero’s example of AI stealing the difficult tasks writers enjoy doing sometimes like planning, drafting, and revising. Although tedious and often redundant, when we have completed the task, there is undoubtedly a sense of pride that follows such a minor accomplishment. Translating thoughts into words that make-up functioning sentences is the art of writing. Yet, we say it’s okay for AI to further help generate our unique ideas because that is what they are supposed to do: predict the future. I don’t know, something doesn’t sit right with me about this. There is something that Gero said at the beginning of her article that reminded me of Peter Elbow: “But instead she turns to an AI writing tool, which takes in her chapter so far and spits out some potential next paragraphs. These paragraphs are never quite what she wants, though they sometimes contain beautiful sentences or fascinating directions.” Doesn’t this sound exactly like finding the beauty within garbage writing? Instead, though, it was AI that did the dirty work behind the masterpiece. If this were my work, I wouldn’t feel fulfilled, and for me, it’s the sense of accomplishment that ultimately keeps me writing through all the blockages.