Work in Progress
The Hidden Costs of Using AI
Everything comes at a cost—even (and maybe especially) the things that seem at first glance to be free. If you’re using AI to help you write or edit your work, here are a few hidden costs to consider.
What do you mean, cost?
If we’re talking actual dollars, sure, it’s cheaper to run your material through AI than hiring an editor. Indeed, it’s free. But you should remember two things: you’re using a machine, not a human; and you generally get what you pay for.
When it comes to the quality of writing and editing, AI functions at a much lower level than a good editor. It might know where to put the commas, but it doesn’t think very creatively and doesn’t handle nuance well.
Using AI also means you’re not paying a person for the service you’re getting. Which means someone is losing that job. We all want to save money, but now might be a good time to take a giant step back and consider the bigger picture of what we’re doing every time we choose AI to do what a human could do.
Is it my imagination or does everyone sound the same?
Read some posts on Instagram—or, I’m sorry to say it, some blog posts. It won’t take you long to notice how the rhythm of the prose is eerily similar. How everyone is starting to sound like everyone else. All those wonderful quirks and qualities that give each of us a unique voice are getting flattened out because we’re using a machine to do our thinking for us.
AI loves to use certain sentence structures and phrases. Once you recognize them, you’ll start seeing them everywhere, and it might freak you out a little. Personally, I find it annoying. As soon as I sense that a blog or Instagram post has been written by AI, I stop reading it.
Publishers and magazines are now including a caveat in their submission guidelines: if you’ve used AI to write your book or short story, they don’t want to read it.
Use it or lose it
Speaking of letting a machine do your thinking for you… What do we expect will happen if we start handing over every complex problem we have to AI instead of taking the time and effort to think them through ourselves? All I can say is that I know what happened to my Grade 5 math. It’s gone. Why? Because I have a calculator on my phone and I don’t generally use math unless coerced.
Does this mean I never use AI for anything?
No. I’ll be the first to admit AI is very good at handling certain jobs. When I was planning my research trip to Berlin and had eight days to fit in fifteen different visits, AI organized my itinerary so that I wasn’t criss-crossing the city unnecessarily. That was great. But it also completely misinterpreted my train tickets and gave me detailed directions to my hotel in Frankfurt using landmarks that it made up. So…
Sometimes I will bounce ideas off AI and use a few of its suggestions as springboards for me to develop on my own. I have asked it questions about income tax (though I’ve been warned by an accountant to be careful about that). I have gotten it to point me in the direction of books I should read for a particular research issue. Some of its suggestions have been helpful, though the most exciting recommendations have usually been for books that don’t exist. And if I ask it specific questions that I happen to already know the answer to, nine times out of ten its answers are almost but not quite correct. In other words, it’s like having a sloppy assistant you can’t fully trust to do a good job.
But AI is a terrible writer. If you give it a paragraph and ask it to rewrite it, it will invariably use that flattened voice and ruin almost everything that’s good about your prose. In other words, it will make you sound like it and not like you.
Is that really what we want?
I’ll leave you with a real (not AI-generated) photograph from Hornby Island of an excellent seagull convention :-)
What I’m (re)reading: Gone Girl, by Gillian Flynn. I love most of this book, but not all of it. If anyone here has read it, I’d love to hear your opinion.
Guilty Netflix pleasure: Homeland. Don’t judge me. I did interrupt my steady viewing of its many seasons to gulp down Dan Levy’s new and fabulous show, Big Mistakes. If you haven’t seen it, go, now, and watch it. You can thank me later.