AI No Substitute for Good Writing

In addition to writing books, I occasionally write articles for print and online publications. I’ve never been one to use AI to write these articles. Besides worrying about AI’s well-known tendency to hallucinate and promote imaginary stories as if they were real, I want my writings to convey own thoughts, not those of an artificial intelligence. That said, I thought I would see what happened when I put an article I had already written and submitted for publication into ChatGPT to see if it could improve the message. I had no intention of actually doing anything with whatever those edits might be, I just wanted to see what would happen. So, I submitted the PDF of my 1200-word article to ChatGPT, asking how it could be improved. After a brief period of thought, ChatGPT came back calling it “clear and insightful,” but with several recommendations. The first made good sense. I had titled my article “Five Reasons why Innovation Fails” but saved the file under the filename “Six Reasons Why Innovation Fails.” It said I should fix the inconsistency. Then it gave me a few recommendations for word choice, sentence length, and redundancy. Finally, it asked whether I would like it to provide me with a revised version of the article that included those recommendations. I said “Yes.”

After a very brief interlude, ChatGPT presented me with the revised version. How did it read? Like an AI-written story. The revised article had lost all the nuances of my writing and obliterated the word flow I had deliberately chosen. It read like a generic story that had been written by a robot. I suppose a 12-grade English teacher might have liked it for conforming to the rules of good English, but I’m not here to write generic stories that follow all those guidelines. I do have to say that there was an occasional word or two I though was an improvement over my original choices, but I left the experiment convinced that I will not be using AI to do anything more than basic proofreading of articles in the future.