Dear Friends,
Recent events have given rise to some questions about the use of Grammarly, ChatGPT, and other such tools in writing.
Should writers use Grammarly and other helpful writing and editing AI?
Should students?
How does the use of such AI interact with the nature and purposes of writing?
Read my answers in today’s essay:
“Is It Okay to Use Grammarly?”
But don’t let me have all the fun! Tell us:
Do you have a strong opinion on this matter?
Or are you ambivalent?
Do you use Grammarly or like supports?
Let the conversation begin!
I absolutely agree. It’s one thing to use basic tools like spellcheck or word count, another altogether to ask for and take tone or phrasing suggestions from AI. I have pretty low tolerance for AI when it comes to any art form! The point is to hear from and connect with a person, like you said in this piece.
My hope is that the true art will end up feeling so much more human and real in comparison that we’ll all recognize it instantly and be able to weed out the rest.
interesting–when I first saw ads for Grammarly all the time about 5-6 years ago, it was always in the context of writing an email to your boss. Now more recently, I have managed AI-generated marketing content at my "real" job. I have no experience in the context of more personal or academic uses of AI, so I'll leave it at "I agree with you" there.
In the content marketing sphere, there is a constant competition to rank higher than the "bad" ai-generated content and the "bad" human-written content with "good" AI-generated-content-that-is-then-edited-by-a-human-to-sound-more-human. This is, of course, because the google algorithm has an incredibly technical set of standards for what content it ranks higher which changes periodically and is almost impossible for a human to absorb and apply to every piece of copy they write. Marketers already use tools galore to check for "readability" and proper distribution of keyword phrases; having an AI write the entire text was the obvious next step. One of the big problems with this is that AI often creates fake statistics to back up its statements and links unrelated data to back it up, which will suffice for Google's algorithm criteria but is...false. It's a very depressing spiral, and most of the "helpful articles" that pop up on google when you ask google a question are probably a weird cyborg of human and AI.
I am curious what you think of tools like the Hemingway editor (basic version, not the paid AI stuff) which points out which sentences are too wordy, overuse of the passive voice, etc. https://hemingwayapp.com/