March 2022

And Could You Tell the Difference?

Recently, I came across Sudowrite, an artificial intelligence (AI) tool that helps writers to write, obviously. Like, really write. You put in a couple of sentences and it spits out the rest of the paragraph in all levels of heat! I played around with it and I was a bit shocked when I realized that a lot of tedious searching for the right adjectives, descriptions, and plot lines can be substituted by a click of my mouse (worth 20$ per month for the subscription). And then I was even more shocked when it turned out there are AI writing tools out there for everything – from ads, e-mails, blogs, up to business pitches and song lyrics. What the heck? Have I been living under a rock?

I might have, but putting that aside, the fact that AIs can write (and probably are writing) instead of humans is kind of sad, terrifying, and intriguing at the same time. It makes one wonder how much of what we read is actually written by humans. And could one tell a difference?

Some research has found that AI-generated texts can be indistinguishable from human ones and can provide insights into future creativity. Fears around the abilities of AI algorithms to generate convincing text have led to some claiming that machine intelligence would render creativity obsolete. For some people, AI writers have even made writing more natural. They have to put in much less effort to create a coherent storyline. The audience doesn’t notice the difference when reading their work, but it helps them save time and get their work done quicker.

To prove my point, this paragraph above has not been written by me, but by Rytr (Best AI Writer, Content Generator & Writing Assistant – as the creators like to point out). Have you noticed? Sure, it helped me fill this blog post, but it also made me feel like a fake, nevertheless. And call me old-fashioned – I still like to write my books without the assistance of Rytr and the likes of him/her/it.

If you want to read more about various AI tools for writing out there, here’s the link to an interesting article providing more information.