I have been writing online in some way, shape, or form since about 2005/06.
I’ve seen all the tools come and go. I’ve used many of them, bought them, subscribed and honestly, the only ones that I use nowadays are Grammarly, because my punctuation sucks mostly, and I also use title capitalization tools like this bad boy and occasionally character counting tools like this one.
Recently I was asked by someone what my thoughts were on web-based AI writing tools and services. Well here are my thoughts ma'am.
My first instinabout to AI in the world of online content creation is eww, yuck, get it away.
The word 'poser' comes to mind. As does fake and lazy.
And I can tell you exactly why I feel this way. I don’t have thoughts on this topic, I am embedded in it. I create written content and come up with briefs for others and the amount of AI-written garbage that is sent to me regularly by lazy, swindling writers trying to make easy money is insane.
But hang on…those are humans trying to do the swindling right, why the hate for the bots man?
Correct. Those are my initial gut instincts, and for good reason, as explained above. I’m not paying some jack-ass to write me a so-called high quality article with a high level of expertise on a topic just for them to type some words and phrases into a tool like Jasper AI and then send it back to me with their hand out asking for payment.
To give you a brief example of what I mean. Here is a brief comparison of an AI versus me.
I wrote this piece on my blog yesterday titled Crypto Staking Newbie Guide. You can see it’s absolutely flawless. Haha. Just kidding. But, honestly, it’s OK right? It was written by me, a human and I think it makes sense, its clear and tells you what it is supposed to tell you. Lets compare it to one of these tools shall we:
I input the exact same title into Jasper AI’s Blog Post Outline template tool, along with the tone of voice being: chatty, friendly, knowledgeable. Here is the result:
Lets review the result.
1, yeah OK.
2, gotchya.
3, makes sense.
4, what, its 2022?!
5, back on track,, makes sense.
6, again with the nonsense.
Lets try something else.
This time I will try the template called Blog Post Intro Paragraph.
Create the inputs, hit generate, here is what I get:
Upon first look it seems OK.
There is a flow and its understandable.
But upon looking at with a critical eye. The very first sentence needs to be scrapped, there is no way I am putting my name on anything that says X is a ‘great way to make some extra money’. No way. If this was a human writer, I would not use them again because it’s giving readers the wrong impression and it threatens me and my business.
Further down in the first attempt you will see Jasper is now apparently telling the reader I am going to recommend them which coins to stake. F*ck you Jasper!
This robot is potentially going to get me into trouble!
Real fears. The robots are coming?
If you recall just a mere 3 years ago the Elon Musk backed OpenAI refused to release its research on its AI text generator because they said it was 'too good' and that they felt it may be misused.
I am a writer first, a storyteller. At least that is what I think of myself. And this just gets my heckles up and puts me on the defensive instantly because as you can see these tools are not the best, but they are getting better and better all the time.
This freaked me the hell out.
How can I compete with a content-creator version of Arnold Schwarzenegger from Terminator 2? It’s impossible. I started having visions of these AI writers like Jasper and Arnie, writing news, guides, jokes, movie scripts and more. Live news and sports scores were coming out and being published immediately, rendering all of us text-based human content creators useless.
That was the worst case scenario.
As I have gotten older, I like to think I have become more rational and so I decided to do what I always do when I freak out and go for a walk. Something the stupid robots still need help doing. Yeah I’m looking at you Boston Dynamics.
After some time spent thinking about it, I'm somewhat less defensive and maybe even potentially optimistic. The thing is that many of these so-called AI tools that come along are apparently 'so good' but in actual fact, they turn out to be just ok in the end as I showed you a moment ago.
They are OK enough to spend a few bucks on but just like any other piece of stupid technology, you need to slap it around now and again because it’s not perfect, just like the old TV units you’d have to bang on the top to get the picture quality right because the signal was wonky.
Take Grammarly for example. I used the paid version initially and thought, oh wow, great, I always forget to put a comma there, but after some time the thing just became annoying and I started to see its flaws because, after all, it is a machine that barely compares to an Ant in complexity, let alone a human toddler, let alone an adult human writer. Real talk.
Ahh, that made me feel a whole lot better, comparing the AI demons to a miserable little Ant.
All things considered, pro’s, cons, Jasper getting me into trouble, Arnold…the AI writing tools that do exist, they are crude at best and virtually all of them lack the capability and struggle when given what we would consider an easy task such as 'write a 1000-word essay on the topic of fly-fishing'. They just can’t do it in a comprehensive way that is comparable to a human writer. Not that I have seen anyway. Feel free to change my mind.
And maybe Elon Musk and crew do have something so jaw-dropping that it would put us all out of business, this website, Hacker Noon included. Maybe, they do, maybe they don’t. I’ve not seen it and I’m not waiting around either.
On the positive side, I think these AI text and content systems will be helpful in helping us content writers with the more mundane things like coming up with TLDR text, extracting or coming up with keywords from text, writing excerpts, meta-tags, and so on and so forth no different to how spelling and grammar checks, character and word counters or title capitalization tools did in times past.
For now, I’m going too continue doing what I always do, creating content. If and when Jasper, or Anrold Schwarzenneger or the Ants or anyone else wants to go toe-to-toe, well we can do the caveman dance and see what happens.