My writing group ran out of stuff to talk about. You wouldn’t think that could happen, not to writers, but it does. Fortunately we had the internet. When you have the internet, there’s always something to talk about.
Carol opened her laptop. “Let’s run some of our writing through AI. Who’s first?”
No one volunteered.
“Okay. I’ll go first.” She cut and pasted a snippet of her memoir. Then hit go.
Carol writes in long, compound sentences. She occasionally loses her way, with a clause wandering far afield. AI corrected none of this. It made long sentences longer, and big paragraphs bigger.
AI added words, especially adjectives, which doesn’t help anyone. AI created redundancies.
We laughed a lot that day, Carol most of all. Her writing was starting to look pretty good. Despite flaws, her view is always there, a sort of pleasing naivete. AI erased this, or tried to. Like a politician, it threw out an ink cloud of words, making her sound like everyone else.
Let’s do some defining. Artificial means made by man. Look it up. So this is a nonsense word, since the product is, supposedly, not man-made. As for intelligence, intelligence is as intelligence does. If something intelligent does something stupid, it’s not intelligent.
AI couldn’t help Carol, but maybe it could help Barry. He was having trouble adjusting images on his website. Since none of us had a clue, he went to the answer desk. This, of course, is “powered by AI”, as the host informs users.
Barry typed in “How do I change an image”. Here is the exchange:
Barry: How do I change an image?
AI: I can help you with your question, and thank you for using your AI-generated HelpDesk. Changing images is quickly and easily done using control panel prompts. To begin, go to Images, then press Start.
Barry: There is no Start.
AI: Press Go.
The thing didn’t even know its own lingo. No correction. No clarification, just a new word.
In any endeavor, if you can’t rely on consistent terminology, what have you got? Let’s run that one through AI.
Then again, let’s not. We already know the answer.
Richard Donnelly lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Classic flyover land. Which makes us feel just a little… superior. He publishes a weekly column of essays on the writing life at richarddonnelly.substack.com