Where's the Voice, Copilot?

At the risk of sounding like a curmudgeon*, I'm not a fan of "assistance" by AI when writing.

There's a big difference in providing flags for grammatical errors and AI frequently "helping" by suggesting words and/or complete sentences to assist me when writing. Oh, I can see where it'd be a useful tool to have around if you're trying to write an email for work and you're stuck on how to present it properly, but most of the time I can muddle through without much of an issue. After all, there's a certain value to experience at work. (I think.)

But when you're writing a blog post or fiction, where you want a specific voice, having Copilot or another pseudo AI pop up word or sentence structure suggestions isn't very helpful at all.

The AI portion begins around the 3:33 mark,

which I'm linking to right here.

Believe it or not, this post wasn't caused by Emma's gripe about AI on The Late Show a few days ago, but this article on The Register about roughly half of the people laid off due to AI are predicted to be rehired at a lower payscale. That didn't exactly surprise me, given the shoddy quality of work I've seen out of people who think using AI to do their job and not bothering to check the results has risen quite sharply over the last year. Remember the line "trust but verify" that I mentioned in the post on Wednesday? Yeah, kind of like that.

But her complaint as an author pretty much hits home for me. If you don't know what you're doing and you're trying to write something (such as a support document) for your job, then fine. Let Open AI have a crack at it. But if you're trying to write fiction and you just rely upon Copilot or another Open AI to do your work, people WILL notice. You (yes, you) have a specific authorial voice, and even if you're writhing as Anonymous, people will know it's you who wrote the piece because of that voice. But if you let AI create the word salad, you'll discover that your authorial voice vanishes. And people won't like it.

So my advice is to do the hard work of learning your voice and keep writing to learn how to use it. Your voice is your own; don't abdicate your uniqueness to some Generative AI.

Oh, and after writing this but before I published it, this little ditty dropped from Jared Henderson:

Hucksters and swindlers using AI to try to make a quick buck by flooding Amazon with "ebooks" close enough to the original human-written work to fool customers? Who'd a thunk it? Maybe if some swindlers start using AI to create ebooks "exposing" some of these leading AI CEOs, something will get done. There are enough tech CEOs with fragile egos that maybe they'll get something done about this slop. Or, unfortunately, they'll probably just create their own slop to counter the original.

*The late Andy Rooney comes to mind. I can only imagine what his commentary about the rise of Generative AI would be like. I think that Wilhelm would have met his match, never mind me.