Last month, I posted a short short story I called “Customer Complaint” on this blog. A few days later. I was searching for something unrelated when a critique of the story I had posted popped up spontaneously—generated by the search engine’s AI program. I’m not sure why. The AI program told me it liked the story, even calling one or two elements of the story “comedy gold.” I don’t know what measure it used to evaluate the story, and because it is AI, and on my computer, I wondered if it gave me its honest opinion (if AI can have an opinion), or if it was just telling me what it thought I would like to hear.
I don’t trust AI yet. Part of that is my native skepticism of all things mechanical—any office worker knows that copiers, for example, cannot be trusted. Never let the photocopier know you are working against a deadline. Doing so increases the chance of a serious malfunction bringing your work to a screeching halt past 90%. Part of my mistrust stems from my understanding a bit about how it works, while another part stems from not knowing enough about how it works. And as a writer, I have major concerns about how you can control plagiarism of your work by AI.
The AI that has burst most spectacularly onto the world stage are the large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Copilot. But LLMs are more like probability engines than basic search engines. LLMs look at your question, sort through the many ways other people have answered similar questions in the past, and put together the response that is most likely to be relevant. That doesn’t mean that an LLM will come up with the right answer. The legal profession, for example, is inundated with stories of lawyers who used something like ChatGPT to write a brief and ended up turning in a brief that looked good but had citations to non-existent cases. The term “hallucinated cases” describes this illusory case law. To put it mildly, judges are not amused when lawyers submit such briefs. The sanctions for doing so are becoming increasingly severe. One lawyer I know uses a Chat GPT type platform as an aid, not as a substitute for doing his own research. He tells an amusing story about arguing with the AI program about its hallucinating cases. He told the program it was hallucinating cases, and the program “shouted” back at him (all caps) “I AM NOT HALLUCINATING CASES.” (But it was.)
The search for the most relevant answer also has another side effect. The one answer an AI LLM program is not likely to give is “I don’t know.” Their programming insists that they provide an answer, and they will do exactly that, regardless of whether the answer provided is correct.
The part of the technology I don’t understand is what allows AI to have conversations with people. We recently upgraded our Amazon Alexa devices to Alexa Plus, which is AI-based. (We did that to stop fighting with the bedroom Alexa over the differences between the phrase “turn on the bedroom lights” and “turn on bedroom lights.”) I have had two tentative conversations with Alexa Plus where I was asking her/it questions with no right or wrong answers; questions about what she likes or feels, just to see what would happen. (My daughter gave me some weird looks when she walked in on those). I felt as if I were talking to a person.
I use ProWritingAid to help me edit my work. It also has an AI option, but for now, I leave that feature alone. But the availability of AI writing aids is growing because AI can be useful. That usefulness will only increase with time as the technology develops further. If you can trust the AI program you use to keep your work confidential rather than adding your work into its repertoire of training material, it could be useful in proofreading. It also might be helpful in generating ideas on how to promote your work and in providing research sources you may not have considered.
Are there any ways you use AI to help you with your writing efforts, whether it is in proofreading, editing, promotion, marketing, or something else? If you have tried AI, what do you think of it? What is your general impression of the technology?
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