I think I’ve figured out why it upsets me so much when people use generative AI to compose material to create nearly 100 percent of a letter or other writing project, and then not source it as AI generated.
I see this time and time again in my personal and professional life.
It’s not necessarily the fact that AI derives its output from people’s original copyrighted works without the owner’s permission. Although the courts are deliberating on that question now.
It’s not the fact that AI can be used positively, and that it can help us think outside the box when we can’t find the exact words to portray how we feel.
It’s certainly not the fact that properly used AI is being used right now to crunch huge datasets and clinical data to help find cures for diseases that have plagued us for decades.
What upsets me is the ego of some of its users!
Let me explain. Most of us can tell when a piece of writing is outside of the style or ability of its author. Most of us can tell when a paragraph or two sounds suspiciously like another boilerplate AI generated piece that we’ve read before. It’s incredibly easy to run a piece of writing through several AI detectors to confirm our beliefs. Yet, the “author” of the piece believes they can fool everyone with the lack of writing effort on their part, and that their “brilliant” effort will fly right over the heads of their uneducated and oblivious reading audience.
I’m here to tell them… No. It most definitely does not.
And it damages their credibility. The readers understand they weren’t worth more than a one or two sentence prompt to a generative AI robot. A 15 or 20 second effort at most.
When used as a thank you, it’s not heartfelt. The original act leading to the thank you was one of kindness, and the resulting thank you is one of dismissiveness.
Let’s not let generative AI do what can be done best and more intimately as true conversation and correspondence between friends, colleagues, and acquaintances.
*Story image generated by DALL-E 3, “Copilot” Bing AI from Microsoft 
