Writing in the age of AI

Ateesh Tankha, Founder and CEO, ALSOWISE^Ⓡ, shares his thoughts:

I never depend on AI to write anything.

I find that its much-vaunted artificial output displays a universal opinion, a moribund style, and a flat tone. Though social media is agog with the acolytes of AI revelling in its ability to produce doggerel masquerading as verse, or a pastiche of thoughts posing as an essay, I take comfort in my own humble ability to turn out what I feel is as clear, concise and compelling as anything I am likely to be assisted with.

My somewhat inflexible standards notwithstanding (mea culpa), I have been continuously tempted by friends and others to try one or other generative AI chatbot for some time. Eventually, this mix of resistance and insistence reached a point, about a month ago, when I felt the strong urge to have done with it. After all, what point was there in staying away from a service which, if it proved to be inadequate, could be easily abandoned?

I duly set myself the task, one Saturday, to test the writing capabilities of a particularly famous brand. I chose for my topic, a pet peeve – Digital Currencies – something about which I write frequently, and unapologetically. At the outset, I decided that my prompt should include a request:

• To cover a specific aspect of digital currencies
• To summarise the opportunities and challenges that a country would face in its implementation
• To suggest a possible future solution
• To restrict its length to 700 words

In the full knowledge that I am not an accomplished prompt writer, I shared my thoughts with a friend in the United States, who has had extensive experience in churning out acceptable, and even superlative (according to some clients), AI content across a plethora of topics for both personal and professional use.

After much to-ing and fro-ing, we finally settled on an acceptable prompt which was 83 words in length. The output was execrable. It had collated all sorts of facts and figures, provided a storehouse of conventional wisdom, and concluded with a respectably reasonable, but utterly irrelevant, vision of the future.

My friend laughed. I grimaced.

Eventually, after a few more attempts, the AI assistant was able to produce a somewhat satisfactory composition of 692 words. I still had to spend about ten minutes reading the piece, and editing to my satisfaction, but even I had to admit that it had created something that was “almost” acceptable.

That is, until the absurdity of it all dawned on me, and it was I who laughed at myself. I had made 5 attempts, the last of which included a detailed 394-word prompt, replete with specific data points and even more specific opinions. The whole process had taken more than 2 hours.

And then, earlier this week, I wrote an 850-word piece on digital currencies for a publication. It took me a little more than two hours to prepare a draft. And approximately fifteen minutes to edit before submitting the article for publication. When I compared the two articles, side by side, it was evident to me that the first, despite my best attempts to rework the piece by inserting my turn of phrase and personal opinion, lacked authenticity.

This, for me, represents the crux of the issue. More than anything else, writing manifests an individual’s thought process, provides credibility to an opinion, and clarifies the motivation behind the need to articulate something in the first place. Without these, writing is pointless, diffuse and hollow. To say nothing of the fact that, after a while, AI output also all reads the same.

I never depend on AI to write anything. And neither should you.