Writer Sticks Toe into AI Waters
Do I write like a robot or like Susie Bright?
Writing is hard. Not every writer agrees but this is true for me, especially as I age. I lose words and have to resort to online dictionaries to look up synonyms constantly. But I’m so thankful for the internet, where I do almost all my research. I’m from the generation of Boomers who used to rely on card catalogs and libraries, making notes about books and articles on 5X7 cards. It was a slog.
And now we have AI. When I first learned about AI, I downloaded Chat GPT, the free version, and asked it to write a poem about electrical work. What resulted was not great literature, but it was pretty good, an amusing eight stanzas.
Later I got stuck on a project and asked chat GPT to edit my essay. What came out was ok, but uninspired. The sentence structure was improved, but it lacked style. The writing, if I were the professor critiquing, just wasn’t very good. Then it occurred to me that AI has all the writing in the history of the English language to refer to and pull from. Hmm, maybe most writers of English just aren’t very good writers.
Then I realized that I needed to provide AI with a style or it would just churn out robot-like copy. I pulled up chapters of a story written long ago about my mother’s time in Europe during WWII. Someday I’ll finish it. I asked AI to rewrite chapter 1 without giving it a style to go by. AI didn’t change it at all. I guess that’s the equivalent of getting an A on your paper in the AI world. No rewrite needed. But is it telling me I write stylelessly, like a robot? Oh dear.
Better pick a style. Ok, what style shall I suggest? Who are my favorite writers? Goddess! There are so many to choose from. I landed on Susie Bright, an articulate, clever writer who knows how to put a sentence together. She writes a lot about sex. Maybe using her style would make my writing sexier. That could be a plus.
But would I be stealing her style if I told AI to “rewrite in the style of Susie Bright?”
I ran chapter 2 through the Susie Bright style AI edit, imagining a stylish, bright end product. AI made a couple of changes, not at all sexy or particularly amusing. Does this mean Susie and I have similar styles?
I either write like a robot or I write like Susie Bright.
Or maybe AI isn’t all that bright.
What shall I do with chapter 3? Perhaps the Humanizer GPT, created no doubt to fly under the professor’s robot detector.
