"AI may be pounding on the writer's door. But the writer has some defenses. AI cannot do what you can do to make your work un forgettable: Surprise the reader. Write with truthfulness and humanity. Write with fresh verbs."
"I'm not Pollyannaish enough to believe that journalism, literature, marketing content, and other forms of writing can easily resist the onslaught of bots. Countless news organizations and other employers of writers are relying on the word production and hallucinations of AI even though they also require human writers to fix them - the so-called AI babysitters. Here's a grim testimonial about where that leads: "I contributed to a lot of the garbage that's filling the internet and destroying it," a writer told the BBC after he lost his job rewriting AI-generated articles for a company. "Nobody was even reading this stuff by the time I left because it's just trash.""
"He's right. It's distressing and everywhere: bad summaries, flat, uninformative explanations. Here's a typical example. I searched "how to use perambulate in sentence" and landed on a site that offered many paragraphs of fluff before this instruction: Begin your sentence with a subject, like "He" or "She." Follow the subject with the verb "perambulate" to indicate the action of walking or traveling."
"AI content tends to run to what I'm arguing against: numbing obviousness, lack of nuance, forgettable phrasing, clichés, and lifeless metaphors, telling not showing, no personality."
AI-generated writing often produces bland summaries, flat explanations, and forgettable phrasing. Some writers report contributing to low-quality internet content when companies rely on AI and then require humans to correct it. The result can be material that nobody reads. Examples show generic, padded instructions that add little beyond obvious guidance. The writing approach emphasizes avoiding numbing obviousness, lack of nuance, clichés, lifeless metaphors, and telling instead of showing. Surprise the reader, write with truthfulness and humanity, and use fresh verbs to create personality and memorable language.
Read at Harvard Gazette
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