I think we're getting close to the crux of the argument here.
By the parameters of this discussion: nothing. Maybe that's the crux of the debate. Not the human writer vs the genitive AI writer, but the human editor vs the AI auxiliary editor.
Yes. It's the difference between "AI Bot, write me a story about a cat and a grasshopper that live in Chicago in the Roaring Twenties" and AI Bot, here is a story about a cat and a grasshopper that live in Chicago in the Roaring Twenties. Please look it over for glaring defects in phrasing and for possible anachronisms."
If we're talking about using AI within the context of this forum, the rules are probably much different from those of the world at large. We expect that what we get from our fellow writers is the unalloyed product of their labor. When we enter a contest here, we expect the same. The training wheels are off. So using AI in this context would be unethical, in that we are not living up to the expectations of the other people on the forum.
But if you took something you've written, even when it's first posted on the forum, and then processed it through AI and released it into the wild, the the ethics are much blurrier. I might submit such a piece to my local paper, but would hesitate to send it to the
New Yorker.
To be great, truly great, you have to be the kind of person who makes the others around you great.
(snip)
I typed that into a word document recently and the whateveryoucallit suggested a rewrite. Use more concise language. The AI has the temerity to suggest editorial changes for one of the most everlasting voices of wisdom and wit and intellectual slam down, Use "must" instead.
The AI substitutes "must" for "have to be" because its algorithm has been adjusted to do it. It presumes that regional variations and colloquialisms have no place in its purified output. Mark Twain knew better. He had the choice between "must" and "have to be" and chose the latter because the first one is commonly more used by a superior dictating something to an inferior, whereas the latter is more commonly used between equals.
Similarly, E. B. White pointed out in
The Elements of Style that Mr. Lincoln was flirting with disaster when he used the phrase "four score and seven years ago" rather than the more concise "eighty-seven years ago" but he went with cadence rather than economy. When AI has the ability to discern between the two, and choose cadence, then we'll have a real problem with AI quality.
It bears repeating what Twain said in his foreword to
Huckleberrry Finn:
In this book a number of dialects are used, to wit: the Missouri negro dialect; the extremest form of the backwoods Southwestern dialect; the ordinary “Pike County” dialect; and four modified varieties of this last. The shadings have not been done in a haphazard fashion, or by guesswork; but painstakingly, and with the trustworthy guidance and support of personal familiarity with these several forms of speech.
I make this explanation for the reason that without it many readers would suppose that all these characters were trying to talk alike and not succeeding.
I can see AI obliterating these nuances of dialect, resulting in the deletion of a major theme of the book.
In sum, bear in mind what Twain said: "The difference between the right word and the almost-right word is the difference between the lightning and the lightning bug." We can tell the difference when we see it. But can AI do the same?
