Why? Because I hate the mediocre crap! By and large it is pitiful poorly written garbage.

(My vision of the AI monster preparing to destroy all actual writing and all actual images.)

Last year I sat down to renew my Office 365 subscription. It usually ran about seventy dollars but not that time. It was a hundred dollars. They had added AI and they charged me an additional thirty dollars for it. No choice. I was in the middle of several projects so I couldn’t opt out of the service although I am really thinking about going over to WordPerfect on the next renewal date.

I did one experiment with it. I gave it five words and a topic. It wrote an essay. Not a very good essay but sort of C+ kind of high school essay. The content did not alarm me. What alarmed me was the entire process took about thirty seconds. In theory, I could generate 120 essays in an hour. And I could see in my mind’s eye, some person writing a blog online or doing school or college work or writing editorials for the local paper writing essay after essay after essay with the touch of a few buttons.

That was the last time I used the AI feature on Word. Every time I start the program, every single damn time, it starts with the AI program with the prompts to use it. I have to deliberately turn it off.

I write my blog myself. It is my thoughts, my ideas, my writing, my spelling, my punctuation and my phrasing. You, my readers, deserve nothing less.

I am considering putting some kind of “NO AI” label on the site. If one is not available online currently, I’m sure it will be soon.

I want you to know I am not the only one upset by the explosion of AI mediocrity.

Here is the magazine Scientific American’s published article linked to below by linguist Naomi S. Baron which discusses AI and writing :

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/what-humans-lose-when-ai-writes-for-us/

But what happens to human communication when it’s my bot talking to your bot? Microsoft, Google and others are building out AI-infused e-mail functions that increasingly “read” what’s in our inbox and then draft replies for us. Today’s AI tools can learn your writing style and produce a reasonable facsimile of what you might have written yourself.

My concern is that it’s all too tempting to yield to such wiles in the name of saving time and minimizing effort. Whatever else makes us human, the ability to use words and grammar for expressing our thoughts and feelings is a critical chunk of that essence.

I was easily able to find numerous articles in a similar vein and to my dismay many cheerleading articles as well.

But I’ve made my decision.

I am a man hopefully a gentleman — and I do my own writing.

James Alan Pilant