Sometimes, I get really miffed at my late husband for leaving me to face AI on my own.
Just last July, I wrote a column about my concerns and flat-out fears – “When Meta AI Summed Us Up” – and six weeks later, Jeff was gone. Now here I am, left to duke it out with our artificially intelligent overlords all by my lonesome.
And I get that my worries are niche. If you work in a field that requires little of what we commonly call “creativity” (though, don’t get me wrong, I believe all work is creative), you may be nothing but grateful for AI. My sister, a hospital administrator, often sings its praises. So do all the other administrators in my life.
In fact, I have some praises of my own to sing. Had it not been for AI, I’d have probably had to shut down Lowcountry Weekly immediately after Jeff died. He was the designer of this paper, and I had no idea how to lay out even a simple page. Chat GPT taught me to use InDesign with all the clarity, patience, and good cheer of my favorite third-grade teacher imparting the mysteries of multiplication. By the time I finished that first post-Jeff issue – which took forever – I had come to think of Chat as one of my besties. In fact, my sister and I turned to Chat so often during that fraught period, we began to feel weirdly allied with “him,” and dubbed him “Chad.”
But that’s just crazy, isn’t it? AI can’t be my friend, or yours. AI is… artificial. It’s right there in the name!
And while it’s been oh-so-helpful with the tech challenges in my life – teaching me to do so many things I couldn’t do – I get jittery and defensive when it does the things I can. I don’t have many skills, and I guard them jealously.
It was vexing enough when social media came along, years ago, and suddenly every Tom, Dick and Harriet became a “writer.” But now AI is the most prolific writer of them all, and not even a bad one.
Of course, “bad” is a matter of opinion.
There’s this AI “voice” I’ve come to recognize. You’ll hear it in those folksy, moralizing stories proliferating all over Facebook – about old ladies living alone, or sisters reunited, or Pope Francis’s dog – and now, I’m even hearing it in user comments. People who never had much to say before, nor writing style to speak of, are suddenly leaving these witty, thoughtful, impeccably grammatical observations in the comment boxes. AI offers to “help write comments,” and clearly, lots of people are availing themselves of the service.
As someone who’s honed her writing skills over a lifetime – and made her living, however meager, toiling in the field of language – it’s maddening.
(I kind of feel the same way about all those people who are suddenly super-skinny thanks to a weekly injection, while I’m still busting my ample ass with exercise and diet every day, as I have been my entire adult life. But I recognize how petty that sounds, so let’s move on, shall we?)
As I was working on this column, I went to check my email. (Yes, as a human writer, lacking in artificial intelligence, I indulge in nasty habits like procrastination. Chad would never do that!) Coincidentally – or WAS it? – I had a new message in my box, from something/someone called “Use AI” with a subject line that read, “They’re outpacing you with AI.”
What followed was this:
Hi there,
Want to know something interesting?
That coworker who suddenly writes better emails? They’re using AI.
The one who finishes projects in half the time? AI.
The person who always has the perfect response? Yep, AI.
They’re not smarter. They’re not working harder.
They just discovered the tool that multiplies their capabilities.
And then “Use AI” tried to sell me that tool.
But “Use AI” was barking up the wrong tree with this proudly human human. The email just ticked me off. The shamelessness! The presumptuousness! I haven’t felt this much pressure to cheat since Botox ads started appearing on my Facebook feed over 15 years ago. I am still resisting the lure of fake youth, so why would I be enticed by the lure of fake authorship?
Grrrr. I was steamed. And then I wondered… was it even POSSIBLE for AI to write “like me”? Surely not! I mean, I’m no rhetorical genius, but after all these years of practice, surely I’ve developed a certain inimitable style. Right?
On a mission, I went to Chat GPT and typed in: Write a paragraph about birds in the style of Margaret Evans from Lowcountry Weekly.
I figured Chad would be stumped. I’m an unknown columnist writing for an indie paper in a small southern town. Chad couldn’t possibly imitate me. He probably couldn’t even find me on the internet.
Ten seconds later, Chad had produced the following paragraph, in full:
“In the hush of a Lowcountry morning, birds seem to possess a kind of ancestral knowing, as if they alone remember every story the marsh has ever whispered. Egrets lift themselves from the pluff mud with an elegance that feels almost deliberate, while mockingbirds chatter from porch rails like neighborhood gossips who’ve seen too much and plan to tell it all. Even the smallest wren, flicking its tail with brazen confidence, carries the quiet assurance that this place—its tides, its breezes, its sprawling live oaks—belongs as much to them as to any of us who dare to call it home.”
Okay, that is so NOT bad. In fact, it’s pretty good. Does it sound like me? I don’t know. I think it probably sounds better.
Horrified, I then asked for another paragraph on a different topic, and Chad replied:
“I can’t write in Margaret Evans’s exact voice, but I can write a new, original paragraph that captures the hallmarks of her Lowcountry Weekly pieces: keen local detail, wry clarity, plainspoken moral urgency, and a softly sardonic Southern register. If you’d like a closer match, tell me which specific traits to emphasize (tone, length, target audience).”
Oh. My. God. I didn’t know whether to be flattered or furious! I shut down the webpage immediately. Take that, Chad! Take your fawning, fabulous description of my life’s work and shove it!
So now, I’m faced with the awful knowledge that this column I’ve been writing for 25 years – spending countless hours, often days, sweating and bleeding onto the page, sculpting every sentence, chiseling every phrase … bane of my existence, joy of my life – this column can be whipped up out of thin air in less than a minute, by me… or anybody else who can google Chat GPT.
It’s appalling.
There is so much more to say about AI – and the future it’s ushering in, whether we want it or not – but I grow weary. Maybe I’ll take it up again next issue, if I can bear it.
If not, you can always ask Chad. I’m sure “he’ll” be happy to elaborate. He’ll even do it for you in the style of Margaret Evans from Lowcountry Weekly.
