As CNET Replaces Human Writers with an AI Staff Writer, Is It Time to Skill Up?

Are we being prepared for a world where machines and artificial intelligence have taken over, when humans are nothing more than mere memories?

In this dystopian vision, Artificial Intelligence (AI) has surpassed human capabilities and replaced us in every aspect of life. Is this once futuristic fear now becoming a reality, as AI continues to make rapid advancements and disrupt industries?

With artists up in arms about AI generated art replacing them, their fear is not without merit. While we stand back and watch the furore in the visual creative industries, should we in the writing industry prepare to man the ramparts to repel the oncoming threat to our livelihoods?

First let’s examine what AI can do for writers.

As a writer, I can benefit from AI in many ways. As my own journey through ChatGPT repeatedly told me “the benefits to writers include improved productivity, increased accuracy, and reduced workload”. Here are some of the ways AI tells me it can help me to write better content:

1. Text Generation: AI can generate text based on a prompt or topic, providing quick and easy content for articles. This would be especially useful for me when I am struggling to come up with ideas or I need to quickly generate content.
2. Grammar and Style Improvements: AI-powered writing tools can provide suggestions for grammar and style improvements, helping to produce clear, concise and error-free writing. This can save me a lot of time and make the editing process much smoother.
3. Research Assistance: AI can assist in the research process by providing relevant information on topics and making suggestions for additional sources to consult. This can help me to stay on track and ensure that I am fully informed on the subject matter.
4. Summarisation: AI can help me to summarise information from existing sources, reducing the time and effort I need to spend reading and synthesising large amounts of information. This can help me to stay focused on the task at hand and ensure that my articles are well-researched and well-informed.
5. Automation: AI can automate many tedious writing tasks, such as data entry and formatting. This can help me to focus on the creative aspects of writing, allowing me to produce high-quality content in less time.

All this time that I’m saving from tedious research tasks and text generation appears overwhelmingly impressive, I can hardly wait to spend more time relaxing in the sun with all my extra free time. But will I be able to afford to?

With all this “help” I’m getting from AI, will I retain my skills ? There is a significant risk that my over-reliance on AI could lead to a decline in my writing skills. If I become too reliant on AI to generate text or provide feedback, my own critical thinking, creativity, and storytelling skills will atrophy, and new writers may never develop these skills. It is important that writers find a balance between utilising AI as a tool, while continuing to develop, improve and augment their own skills.

More worryingly, because AI is capable of automating writing tasks, this automation can reduce the demand for human writers in certain contexts. I’m sure that companies and organisations that produce large amounts of content on a regular basis will be quick to turn to AI to generate articles, blogs, summaries, and reports instead of hiring human writers.

Already AI writing is a boon to SEO companies to produce large amounts of content quickly and efficiently for clients who need to regularly update their websites with fresh and relevant content, and one of the most common uses of AI writing is the generation of meta descriptions and title tags, the key elements in optimising website content for search engines.

However, AI is now rapidly moving up the skill chain, as it was recently revealed that the tech news site CNET quietly published AI explainer articles over a period of months on subjects ranging from “What is Compound Interest” to “How to Open a Bank Account”. The AI Journalist wrote with technical skill and authority on all its subjects, and was credited with a byline “CNET Money Staff”. The only problem was, following a review, they found that of 77 articles written by their AI journalist, 41 contained errors and had to be corrected.

The story broke in Futurism, subsequently followed with a disparaging story about the errors , which were picked up by the media, and in January CNET announced they would pause AI-generated articles until the negative stories stop. But this is just a temporary reprieve, as CNET went on to say they will continue to embrace AI writing, so look out for more “CNET Money Staff” articles “once the news cycle moves on”.

While this is a worrying trend, it also presents opportunities for writers and editors. This is an opportunity to skill up to work alongside AI, to humanise the writing even more, to double-check the “facts”, and to do sanity checks on the content.

As it stands today, AI is not yet capable of replicating the creativity, storytelling, and emotional intelligence that make human writing unique.

However, the writing is on the wall, so to speak. It’s time to take steps to ensure that human writers are not made obsolete. Get ready to man the ramparts.

===

Full Disclosure: I did my own research on the CNET News story. I used AI ChatGPT to help me write this article. This required multiple prompts, editing the crap out of the repetitions, and rewriting in “my voice”. I agree with the Futurism headline “It’s kind of a moron”. However, I’d qualify that, it’s more of a “moron savant”. There are nuggets of useful content, which did save me time. It also saved me time on research, helped me to structure the article and to clarify my thinking (I’d be interested to hear if you can distinguish which bits were AI and which were me). I used AI Stable Diffusion to generate the image (with no Photoshopping), this took some more time with a lot of tweaking of the prompts, and discarding over 50 bizarre and unusable images. Despite all the “time saving”, it still took me 3 hours to write this masterpiece. This was typed using Google Docs. And finally I also used a spell check and grammar checker. Regrettably my printed Oxford English Dictionary and Roget’s Thesaurus remained untouched and gathering dust on my overstuffed bookcases, which one day I must get around to clearing, as I multi-task with a library of audible books wittering away in my ear while I prepare dinner and do the laundry.

===

#aiwriter #chatgpt #aicontent #aiart #aicommunity #writerslife #writing #writingprompts #seocontent #cnet