TECHNOLOGY FOR WRITERS
HOW TO WRITE BETTER THAN AI
Douglas McPherson road-tests some writing AI tools, and asks editors and writers what wordsmiths need to do to survive in a world of computer-generated content
I
n an age where artificial intelligence churns out text at lightning speed, the question looms large: can human writers compete, or are they destined to become mere footnotes in the story of creativity?
The scary part is that I didn’t write that sentence. I asked ChatGPT to give me the opening paragraph for an article on how writers can compete with AI.
It’s a decent opening, and it materialised on the screen quicker than I could pull the top off my biro.
The good news, if you’re worried about AI taking our jobs, is that ChatGPT’s para ran to another 71 words – AI-generated writing tends to be excessively wordy – and it wasn’t all such high quality.
Its second sentence was okay, although it basically rephrased its first: ‘As AI-generated content floods the internet, writers find themselves at a crossroads, grappling with both the challenges and opportunities that this technological revolution presents.’
After that, it started to get boring, with a dry tone more suited to an academic paper than the magazine article I had asked for. I think – well, let’s say hope – that what I have written here has that more chatty, engaging quality that makes magazine writing as entertaining as it is informative.
For the purposes of this article, I also gave ChatGPT and its Google-based competitor Gemini some ideas for short stories, asked it to come up with a choice of plots, and then to turn those outlines into complete stories.