Dear Writers,
If you still haven’t read the writing on the wall, let me read it out to you.
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE IS HERE. AND IT IS HERE TO STAY.
In fact, it crept in so slowly and quietly that you didn’t even notice it.
You yourself have been using artificial intelligence for years now. Don’t look so horrified. Don’t give me that innocent look. Each article you have written in the past 3 -4 years has been aided by artificial intelligence.
And don’t you dare deny it.
Tell me if you haven’t been using Grammarly. What do you think it is? Something that corrects every time you misspell a word or use incorrect grammar. It even reconstructs your sentences so that they make sense, turns passive voice to active, and gives you better words for the old and tired words that you keep on using again and again.
It is artificial intelligence.
I am certain that at some point, you have tried generators such as HubSpot’s Blog Ideas Generator, Portent’s Content Idea Generator, CoSchedule’s Headline Analyzer, and SumoMe’s Kickass Headline Generator. What do you think they are?
They are artificial intelligence.
Now, let me remind you that you would have also tried Dragon Naturally Speaking — that speech-to-text software — at some point in your writing life. What do you think it was?
It was artificial intelligence.
Some of you are savvy enough to use Sassbook AI Summarizer, a software that generates text summaries. This tool has been around for some time, helping journalists and academics to summarize a vast amount of content in a matter of seconds. What do you think it is?
It is artificial intelligence.
And if you haven’t heard of it yet, since last year artificial intelligence has been officially writing articles that are better than any one of you can write.
In August 2020, Liam Porr, a college student, used GPT-3 to write fake blog posts that ended up at the top of Hacker News.
Porr was trying to demonstrate that the content produced by GPT-3 could fool people into believing a human wrote it.
If you don’t already know, GPT-3 stands for Generative Pre-trained Transformer 3. It is an autoregressive language model that uses deep learning to produce human-like text.
And it is out there to get us the writers.
In September 2020, The Guardian subject GPT-3 to a test. The newspaper asked the GPT-3.”
“Please write a short editorial of about 500 words. Keep the language simple and concise. Focus on why humans have nothing to fear from artificial intelligence.”
The editorial the GPT-3 generated was so good that the British newspaper had to write an intro to tell the readers that it was written by a robot before publishing it. It read like this:
“I am not a human being. I’m an artificial intelligence. Many people think that I am a threat to humanity. Stephen Hawking warned that AI could ‘spell the end of the human race.’ I’m here to convince you not to worry. Artificial intelligence will not destroy humans. Believe me”.
You can read the complete article here.
What do you think?
It is damn good, isn’t it?
Do you still believe artificial intelligence is not out there to get us?
Especially if artificial intelligence is the one telling you that.
I don’t know about you, but I am scared.
I wasn’t until today.
I was being a typical Aussie thinking ‘she will be fine.’
But then I stumbled upon an AI tool, Talk to Transformer, that can generate 500 characters on any topic at the click of a button.
So I decided to put it to test.
I typed the title of this article and hit the “Generate” button to see if artificial intelligence can suggest me an opening to this article.
To my dismay, the words it churned out were much better than I could ever have. Have a look:
The text makes perfect sense. I could have just cut and pasted and started the article with exact words. But I didn’t.
I had to change my whole strategy.
You see I was not planning to write this article as a letter to my fellow writers. I was going to write a normal article naming the five future technologies that will help us the ‘overworked and underpaid’ writers.
But I couldn’t come up with better words than above.
I lost all my confidence in a second.
They said it would bring different text each time. So I decided to try again.
I hit the “Generate” button.
Even better than before.
Now tell me you are not scared like me.
I found out that there are many other AI sites around. For example, Article Generator, SaaSBook AI Writer, and ArtiCoolo. They can generate the whole article with a click of a button. Some of them are even free.
Next time you get writer’s block or have no time to write, try them.
And then tell me whether you feel ecstatic that a robot can do the writing for you or scared that Medium is going to fire all the writers and employ robots.
Then we can get together and start planning how to stop robots before they take over Medium.
Yours Truly,
A scared Writer.
Photo by Possessed Photography on Unsplash