The night is still young.
Is AI writing assistance ethical?
- Thread starter wearywanderer64
- Start date
But I'm not going to name him.
This thread is intriguing me because we accept what amounts to AI help in so many other arts. Take music, for example. There aren't many pop groups now who don't use some sort of drum track or even melody lines that aren't computer-generated. Wrong vocals can be fixed. Harmonies can be suggested. We aren't particularly distressed about this, because they are all ways of helping the artist achieve the goal of matching what's in their head with what ends up on the recording.
Another thing, possible tangential. I have made a few reproductions of medieval furniture. Some of them have been made with the use of modern tools like power tools and drills and the like. Others I have made on a reproduction woodworking bench, using saws and mallets and planes that I have made myself. When asked why I go through the trouble of doing this, I reply that what I am really doing is trying to get as close to the mind-set of the medieval woodworker. I use a frame saw as he would have, presumably with the appreciation he felt for the labor involved in making that saw and adjusting its use to the particular wood I'm sawing. The tools dictate the speed and pacing of the work, which is as close as I can duplicate the medieval woodworker's experience with the wood. I'm more interested in the process than the product.
Of course, I don't sell the work, so its monetary value is irrelevant. Not so with the free-lance writer. If I were making that furniture for a living, as many of my friends do, I would be the first to use the drill press and the table saw and the jointer. If I were a free-lance writer for pay, I could see using something that would make my work more salable and efficient. If I wrote a piece on the medieval scribe, I would be using a computer and word-processing program, not parchment or a quill pen. (Although, come to think of it, I might indeed write a few pages that way just to see what it's like.)
I don't know what anyone has against Charlemagne anyway. Grok says he loved AI.
Who Hitler? Nothing wrong with mentioning him in proper academic contexts. I do it all the time. Denying the existence of something would be a very Nazi thing to do.
I dicked around with the AI in Word a bit today. You can't the difference between it and a bad human writer save for perhaps the lack of typos. It can finish a scene no problem and is light-years ahead of where it was even a year ago. It would not be difficult at all for me to rewrite a few words, reshape a few scenes, and correct for tone. Nobody would know the difference. Scary is what that is. If I was an editor without scruples I would never pay another human writer again.
And if you mean copilot - copilot sucks. I don't know about for writing (well, I kind of do, because that's why I went to Scrivener -Copilot wouldn't stop making awful suggestions and kept turning itself back on when I shut it off), but for beta purposes anyway.
Yeah, to see what it would write for the next page. If that's the sucky one, I'd hate to see what the good one can do.
Try Claude. Especially if you calibrate it. It's amazing for beta reading, but I've seen what people post for it writing. It is truly terrifying.
Edit: there are Claude subs on reddit, not just for writing, but like coding, app building, troubleshooting, etc. all in the Claude subs so I've seen what people post for it's writing.
This is the thing - you can't base what an AI can do today based on what it was like even 6 months ago. It's moving that fast. I haven't tried the Chinese one though - now that's one I wouldn't trust.
transplant
Member
Here is a scary article. It's a bit off-topic but in terms of AI's near future...
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/morgan-stanley-warns-ai-breakthrough-072000084.html
I remember the first time a co-worker showed me an ad that identified a surge protector as "Internet-ready." Or was it a filling cabinet, I can hardly remember.
*clapping hands*
Some people may laugh at it, but the AI did *not* tell you to eat any rocks. That caricature is no longer valid, at least, not in this scenario.
Do any of you use AI assistance like Grammarly, Hemmingway Prowriting Aid? Which one is the best and for what?
I use grammarly for authorship (it counts keystrokes so I can prove my writing is... mine) but otherwise I do my best to ignore it because its suggestions anger me greatly. And I have to keep them on for the authorship thing apparently? At least from what I see/have tried. But some people aren't as... aggressive... about anything suggesting things so it may not annoy you. It also struggles with first person present and frequently red lines and suggests past tense fixes
Authorship? Explain, please.
Grammarly has a service/setting called authorship that counts your keystrokes vs word count to prove that you typed every word. Sure someone could transcribe, but between that and regular backups, etc. It's the easiest way to prove you wrote every word. I write very quickly when I'm on my game, and with all the AI accusations that fly around - I use it as a type of insurance in case I'm ever questioned by a publisher/agent. That, combined with the fact that putting any portion of my work into an AI detector (which is hilarious, just on principle) shows my work as 100% human helps calm my anxiety about how fast I write and how that may be perceived if I were ever to gain an offer of rep.
Does that come up?
