Oh my god, are you scared? I mean, have you used ChatGPT? It’s amazing. I wrote my kids a story in, like, a minute. Then I added Brené Brown’s tone of voice…and…*flicks hands in a jazz hands gesture*…MIND BLOWN.
I get people approaching me with comments like these ALL the time. Sometimes I smile and tell them I’m happy for them. Other times I feel bad that the world’s stealing BB’s voice. Mostly, though, I find myself defending myself.
Why wouldn’t I though, when my own kind are spitting, “are you scared” in my delicate, writer’s ego face?
We all know what “are you scared” really means:
“Oof! Sucks to be you. AI is going to replace you — you mere, mortal human. It’s going to steal your job and leave you singing songs of praise on George St… in the desperate hope that someone will drop a few coins (an utterly useless currency, unless you’re a grandma or a school) into your weary, tapped-out-hands.”
When my very livelihood is under attack, you betcha middle-aged petootie, I’m gonna defend myself.
Even if it means standing on a soap box with a boom box, chanting “Down-with-the-bots, yeah-yeah-yeah!”
Or tattooing a feather quill on my butt, right before mooning every Google office in protest….along with hundreds of other self-respecting, feather-quilled writers. Obviously.
Or, I could spend the rest of my professional life, plotting genius ways to stick it to AI.
But I’m not going to do that.
Because, aside from sounding like a desperate, in-my-day evangelist, AI has its place.
And, whether you’re pro AI…or secretly planning to live on a mountain with a goat (I’ve found just the place BTW), AI is here to stay.
Here’s where AI’s pretty great:
1. When you’re faced with the blank page: the buzzkill of creativity.
2. When you need a brainstorm partner. Particularly helpful when you’ve been living on a diet of no sleep and impossible deadlines, and your human brain has threatened to go into early retirement if you don’t give it a break.
3. When you want to summarise a confronting wall of text faster than Scatman could jazz rap ski-ba-bop-ba-dop-bop. (← I’ll give you a moment to relive every wedding you attended from 1995–1999).
4. As an editor: to check your copy flows from one idea to the next.
5. For SEO, with a caveat. It’s been known to keyword stuff, and we all know the Goog will drop you to the bottom of its endless scroll if you do this.
6. Giving you answers to life’s toughest questions on Quora.
What AI’s not so great for:
1. Bringing human insights, opinions and experiences to life in a way that gives your content depth and colour and relatability.
2. It also gets zero points for tone of voice. But I’ll give it — or is it a ‘he’? She? They? How do bots feel about gender identity? — a virtual pat on the back for trying.
3. Giving you answers to life’s toughest questions on Quora.
This is just my experience, from experimenting with various forms of AI over the last year.
What’s been yours?
Do you use AI? If so, what have you found helpful and not-so-helpful?
Are you into it?
Or will you be making goat’s curd on a mountain top with me, while jazz rapping to the beats of Scatman John?
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