Writing with AI: How to Stay Clear, Credible, and Authentic

Artificial intelligence (AI): It’s here, it will expand in our lives, and its influence will only keep growing.

As with any world-changing technology, AI’s possibilities are both exciting and concerning. It is revolutionizing task performance as well as our access to solutions and knowledge.

At the same time, we’re unsure of what the guardrails will be, who will establish them, and whether the right actors will maintain them.

AI can also supplant some human work with an efficiency that can benefit some while disrupting many. As producers of content, writers in particular can sense the elbows of what can outperform them in speed and amount of production.

AI’s impact on writing extends beyond the professional realm. Because writing is integral to human cognitive function and fitness, we need to recognize how it can impose on our daily reasoning, thought, and communication. This includes how much we allow it to write for us with proper grammar and form.

Writing in the Age of AI: Another Leap Forward to Monitor

The act of writing as we understand it emerged more than 5,200 years ago in Mesopotamia. Around that time, because literacy was limited and writing materials could be costly, many long texts had been memorized and transmitted orally. The spread of writing allowed texts to be shared and preserved more efficiently.

New technologies have clearly moved us far forward since then. In recent times, just a few major advances have included:

typewriters and then word processors faster than handwriting

calculators for processing many forms of arithmetic

global positioning systems (GPS) for greater navigation without maps or human memory

online search engines for massive information retrieval and storage of facts

While these technologies improved our efficiencies, they also shifted the skills people practiced. In the case of AI, it can also change our human reasoning and communication if we’re not alert and mindful of its expansion into our minds.

Writing in the Age of AI: What AI Can Do Well

One of the most powerful resources for writing we’ve ever known, AI can brainstorm, organize, explain, economize, and summarize any topic of any length with great scope and speed. It can do so with a consistent voice and style as well.

Because of its vast reach and sweep of possibilities, AI excels in:

fine-tuning grammar presented to it	improving transitions between ideas
ensuring statements are logical and cohesive	testing an argument
refining textual structure and clarity	proofreading content instantly
assisting in identifying credible sources	detecting and explaining textual errors

With AI, what has often taken people hours to produce, such as researching and writing a 1,000-word article, can now be completed in minutes. In addition, AI gives us fast access to expert information and knowledge for learning and writing without having specialized training.

This in turn can free resources and time for other higher-level work. For example, rather than do the heavy lifting to research and compose a first draft, writers can focus more on narrative strategy and creativity.

Further, for those of us who get stuck when starting to write, AI can move us past the blank page’s blinking cursor by providing prompts, sentence starters, and other guidance in real time.

Writing in the Age of AI: What We Can Do Well

Human readers process information through both thought and feeling. As much as people think and deliberate, they feel. Readers don’t connect deeply with perfect words and arguments. They connect with feelings, thoughts, and experiences they can relate to or recognize.

No matter how far AI advances, it will never be an organism that endures, survives, and perceives in order to share through words what it has imagined and experienced as a singular life. It will always be a simulation generated by mechanical probabilities and adjacencies and expanded by ever-growing volumes of input.

That difference will always distinguish human content from AI’s. As we communicate further with large language models, AI may try to reproduce our writing’s personal intention, but our humanity will likely always detect what AI lacks, even within subtleties.

Nothing will ever replace the love, wisdom, humor, faith, sarcasm, hope, and hard-earned personality behind the writing of a human life.

Writing with AI: Caveats

We’ve touched on the strengths of AI and humans in content production. Particularly, we’ve identified distinctions at the heart of it.

We can also understand more of AI’s specific limitations as they apply to our writing, learning, and thought.

Pre-existing data and training sets. Because it sweeps the internet, some AI-generated content can still contain inaccuracies or biases that develop responses representing outdated or even discredited information.

Attrition of critical thinking. Our human reason is a muscle that must remain conditioned. If we do not exercise our reason ourselves, it can atrophy. We need to regard AI-generated responses with a healthy skepticism that is ready to further evaluate and substantiate them.

Weaker writing skills. Our writing involves more than recording our thoughts. It also prompts the creation of them within ourselves. In many cases, writing reveals what we think, including subconsciously. If we allow AI to write and think for us, we surrender an elemental human faculty. An overdependence on AI for content can potentially make us plagiarists as well.

One study that focused on private universities in China revealed a notable tendency for students to rely on AI for writing assistance. This also showed to reduce the students’ cognitive autonomy. From the study, researchers found AI was becoming a cognitive crutch in that:

34.9% of the students relied greatly on AI tools to correct all grammar errors.

47.6% admitted the quality of their writing declined without AI assistance.

only 43.65% would have consulted grammar books to verify AI suggestions.

What’s the Right Way to Use AI for Human Writing?

AI should never write and think for us, but we can use its powerful resources by engaging it as a well-equipped writing assistant.

We can use AI to:

search for words and word alternatives	simplify complex topics
receive objective feedback	further verify claims
request possible enhancements	close gaps in knowledge
generate title and subhead ideas	refine our skill in asking thoughtful questions

When we balance human creativity and AI assistance, we both harness and unleash the power of technology in writing—all while preserving our ability to think critically and express ourselves as individuals.

Related Topic

Avoiding Plagiarism

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