In my other life, I am a high school maths and physics teacher. There, we are struggling to deal with AI in student assessments. We have tools that give us an indication that the text we are reading is AI-generated, but they are not 100% accurate and false positives occur. What most concerns teachers is cognitive offloading; students who use AI are not exercising the higher-order skills of cognition: data analysis, problem-solving, critical analysis and such that are required in today's complex world. I have also given AI problems from the hardest grade 12 maths program to solve. Despite answers sounding convincing, AI gets some of these wrong.
But AI is useful. We show students how it helps scope out a research task and provide links to relevant research (with the warning that some of these might not be real - AI hallucinates), but we warn that using AI beyond this is not permitted.
Here on SOL, I see authors tagging their stories as “AI-assisted” and “AI-generated” - and that gives me pause for thought about my own writing.
Looking back, in a way I have always used “AI” in my writing. Before AI existed in its current form, there were dictionaries, thesauri and countless books on writing skills, story outlines etc., ad infinitum. Every author used at least some of these. Then, with the advent of personal computers back in the 1980s, dictionaries and thesauri became instantly available - and authors used them without a qualm. Soon, software added grammar checking to the toolkit.
Microsoft Word - the ubiquitous word-processing software - has dictionary, thesaurus and grammar support built in. There’s also the “Editor” tool that provides deeper textual analysis and advice. I found this ‘support’ less than helpful. I rapidly disabled the grammar support; it consistently failed to analyse correctly more complex and stylistic text. One of the unwritten rules of grammar is that you can break any rule - if you are consciously doing so.
Online AI text analysis tools such as Marlowe appeared that offer critical analysis of complete novels in great detail.
There have been software tools that go beyond this for a while. I tried Grammarly, but discarded it when it regularly pinged British (and Australian) English as incorrectly spelled - despite setting the language. So I switched to ProWriting Aid. This provides more advanced support. It analyses text and warns about complex sentences and offers rephrasing. Its latest incarnation is providing detailed textual analysis and story critique.
I have also written an outline of a story and fed it to ChatGPT, asking it to flesh the story out. Which it did, but I have not used that capability for any published work.
I am not a professional writer. I enjoy the art of storytelling and I write for my own pleasure and amusement in part. Using AI to create the story from my outline removes that aspect.
So for me, my use of AI will stay at the minimal ‘support’ level that is deemed permissible in creative writing circles.
Other writers make their own choices.