Mastering the Art of Co-writing with Generative Tools
Dancing with Machines: The Rhythms of Human-AI Co-creation.
First Thoughts:
This article is an extension of last week’s article; I like to keep the length of a piece to a reading time of between 5 and 7 minutes. I don’t know about you, but I tend to skip and scan and not read the entire thing after that.
Quite a few points needed to be detailed a lot more. For example, how does a person start, what are the costs involved, and what is the difference between a collaborative piece and one fully AI-generated? As mentioned briefly in the last article, I have tried to use these tools to write an article entirely, but the resulting work was unusable except for the basis of more cooperative work.
One of the essential points today is not to be worried or intimidated by, for example, GPT-4. It is an incredibly useful tool to ‘get you going’. This morning I was finishing an article that I thought I had started during the week and intended to publish today. But after I was ready to publish, I realised that all I had been doing was polishing last week’s article.
A dumb mistake to make, I know. My solution, ask GPT-4 for ideas to expand last week’s article. Into a ‘Part 2’. Not all of the ideas were useful, but enough were to be able to write and publish before my deadline.
One suggested idea was to discuss the various Generative AI tools now available, covering everything from text-based tools to image generation. While the idea is unsuitable today, it will likely be picked up in the coming weeks. This illustrates one of the key benefits, the generation of ideas.
See Writing in the AI Age: Navigating the Terrain of GPT-4 Generated Articles
Getting Started
Starting your exploration into Generative AI need not cost you anything apart from your time. You can create a free account with OpenAI and have immediate and free access to GPT-3. I would suggest that everybody starts here rather than paying for the extra feature available with GPT-4.
Another free alternative is Bing from Microsoft. Creating one is free if you don’t already have a Microsoft Account; see the helpful links. The number of prompts is more limited if you don’t have an account. Even if you have an account, there are limitations, also for GPT, but I’m not going to detail these here as they change all the time.
Demystifying Generative AI
I’ll spare you the details of how GPT-4, for example, works. It would be easy to ask GPT-4 to generate a detailed explanation and paste it here, passing it off as my work. But it’s rather long-winded and, honestly, a bit boring.
So, instead, let us understand that based on an erroneous amount of training data, GPT-4 has learned to predict and combine known knowledge in new and interesting ways. What it is not is intelligent. Think of the old expression ‘Garbage In, Garbage Out’. The more accurate and unbiased training data fed to these LLMs (Large Language Models for those who don’t know; there can’t be many of you reading this who don’t know, I suppose), the more accurate and unbiased will be the generated outputs.
The impact of this is that, especially for factual-based articles, the writer must independently verify any factual information given. Not doing so will open the writer to justified criticism when errors and inaccuracies come to light. Reputations can be ruined very quickly.
AI and Human Creativity
Where Generative AI is most impactful, from my point of view as a writer, is the generation and deepening of ideas. It is so easy to come up with a simple idea; going from this idea to a fully fleshed-out article outline and thence to the completed piece is the trick. It is here that I use, mainly GPT-4 (at the moment), to help me over the boring bits of writing. Allowing me to concentrate on the meat of the article itself.
I’ve talked about this before, but it is a vital part of the writing process, coming up with good titles and subtitles. Take a look at many posts on Medium, for example. If the title sucks or is clickbait, we don’t even bother checking it out. The piece might well be engaging and informative, but we’ll never know, and it’s all down to the terrible title.
In all its forms, AI must be viewed as a writing assistant, a reliable team member, and an entity that provides a vital sounding board for ideas. Writing is primarily a solo effort, and it is far too easy to fool yourself that what you produce is quality work. Generative AI tools can provide constructive criticism that can help fill this niche in the writing process.
AI Exclusivity
This is only my personal opinion, but I feel that a writer that heavily relies on Generative AI will find it difficult to produce work that is consistent and difficult to produce work that is authentic and identifiable as ‘theirs’. While this may not be important for some, the pleasure of writing will likely elude them and producing the work may become a drudge.
The more AI involvement in the finished piece, at the very least, the work lacks something intangible, even if well-edited. Maybe it’s just me, I’ve used the word before, but I find the text ‘soulless’. It lacks emotional nuances and misses too much to be a pleasure to read.
The other important point is the ‘sameness’ of these posts, regardless of the supposed author. Try it for yourself. GPT loves to use words such as ‘furthermore’ and ‘in conclusion’. It only makes the piece feel padded and generic.
This is my personal opinion, but I’d love to hear yours. Leave a comment; I promise to reply.
Future of AI and Writing
I’m curious about what is coming next; I’d like to see better integration with current events and news. This is possible right now. But the response time can be slow, and often the connections fail or time out.
To peer review, an article or other piece of writing could be helpful, especially with more consistent grammar and spelling checks across the various tools available. For example, GPT-4 may produce a paragraph or two, but run that through Grammarly, and there will always be differences and alternative suggestions.
Image recognition may be the next useful function for non-text-based AI. That is useful for the average person, as many of us have literally thousands of images taken with our phones over the years. Finding a specific image using the current search functions is hit-or-miss, mostly a big miss.
Whatever is around the corner, it’s important to embrace the changes. We need to figure out how to use existing and any new or enhanced functionality for our benefit. Everybody will follow their process, mixing and matching the tools to target their specific requirements.
Final Thoughts
This article has continued the discussion started in last week’s article. The use of Generative AI tools in writing, specifically focusing on OpenAI’s GPT-4. We suggest that AI tools can be invaluable for generating and developing ideas, making them useful collaborators for writers.
Free options like GPT-3 and Bing offer a good starting point for writers looking to explore the potential of these tools. However, we also stressed the importance of verifying AI-generated factual information to avoid inaccuracies.
While AI can assist in drafting, it shouldn’t replace human writing, as the latter provides emotional nuances and a distinct voice that AI can’t emulate. Over-reliance on AI might result in work that feels generic and lacks authenticity.
Looking to the future, we hopefully anticipate better integration with current events, peer review features, and image recognition in AI tools.
See more articles, posts, and discussions about business, project management, the role of human nature, Generative AI and Creative Writing on Medium here. If you have not already, subscribe to Medium. Or follow me here on Substack. The KodifyIT Substack newsletter is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber; I would appreciate the support; you won’t regret it. 👍
Disclosure. I use Generative AI tools to help me when writing. From outline suggestions to topics or subtleties, I had yet to think of.
I apologise to my readers for some of the spellings you may feel are incorrect. I was born and brought up in the United Kingdom, and this is the spelling I am comfortable with (Grammarly is happy with it anyway).