by Eric Hauch
This was the year that artificial intelligence went tete-a-tete with human writers. While AI has been around for years, the introduction of ChatGPT introduced an automated process for synthesizing information expediently and spitting it back out in a human readable format.
Its rapid growth in popularity brought up questions like–what’s the role of the writer and robot, or even, what’s the role of human versus machine–the front of cultural conversation.
As the CEO and cofounder of Authory, an automatic backup and portfolio builder for journalists and content creators, I’m particularly interested in the conversation.
Most People Know Humans Are Still Better Writers
We’ll take a stance and say it boldly, AI can’t replace human writing, at least not yet. And I’d argue most of us know this, despite the buzz.
Sure, you might have seen headlines like “AI vs. Human Writing: Experts Fooled Almost 62% of the Time” or “OpenAI just admitted it can’t identify AI-generated text,” or maybe you’re tuned into the outrage many educators have as their students rely on AI to complete essays, research papers, or write code.
The content AI produces in these tests is literally elementary essays, or highlighting a fact robots can be fooled by robots. Not to say there aren’t examples where a well-promoted essay from ChatGPT hasn’t fooled a reader, but for the most part, when we look at everything we read in a day and wonder if a robot could produce the same effect, I say nay.
Can AI really generate the memes I love, the captions in new slang, the think piece I read over a Sunday coffee? I don’t think so but, hey, don’t take my word for it.
“Researchers have shown that machine learning can generate coherent text in specific settings” Sam Bowman, a professor at New York University, said to the Harvard Business Review. “Really building systems that are able to go all the way from an abstract idea or a set of facts to a long-form coherent text is still something that’s quite difficult.”
In practicality, we all know that ChatGPT isn’t currently on par with human thinking and writing. It’s the nature of general intelligence, which we haven’t reached, and the uncanny valley, which still exists.
“The current state of the text-generation technology is completely incapable of writing any work that could be used in a production,” said comedy writer Adam Conover to TechCrunch when speaking about the writer’s strikes.
But saying the technology can allows executives to undercut the cost of paying and hiring writers.
With that in mind, I feel it’s important to separate out the reality of what’s currently happening from the future. ChatGPT is, of course, remarkable but it’s not penning the next great American novel.
We Still Need the Human Touch
That said, it hasn’t stopped writers from wondering if they’ll be replaced and the people who hire them from wondering the same thing. The conversation isn’t so much about current capabilities but what’s to come and what to change.
While I can’t predict the future, and won’t try (though ChatGPT might), I can say that within this year and the next, we’re doing what we can to support writers at this moment. And at the moment, you can’t do without someone who can tell the truth and tell it well.
Bridging the gap between information and judgment is one thing we know that ChatGPT can’t do. Because of the way the technology works, it summarizes information it’s given or has access to, and without regard for what’s true, false, or malicious misinformation.
AI’s limitations here are clearly a problem. While the tool can summarize, without a human editor there’s no trust that the information is accurate or worth reading.
“When Fast Company asked ChatGPT to write up a quarterly earnings story for Tesla, it spit back a smoothly worded article free of grammatical errors or verbal confusion, but it also plugged in a random set of numbers that did not correspond to any real Tesla report,” according to Fast Company.
Because the role of journalist and writer isn’t just about synthesizing information, it’s about reporting what’s new to the world, taking judgment to it, and then crafting a coherent essay from it. Or in other words, we don’t just need a robot who can fool us, we want a robot who can discover and then teach.
And then of course there’s that little thing called style. Sure, AI can write in the style of someone, but would I replace my team with AI? Absolutely not.
We’re growing a startup and, as a company, we know what we say matters. I can still tell the difference between what’s written by a robot and our team, which is why some of our first hires were content marketers and fiction writers. We want to make sure when people discover us, we make a great impression. That’s not something I’ll trust to ChatGPT quite yet.
We built a human certification tool
Robots can’t replace writers yet, it’s also true some people want to verify there’s a human behind the writing. With that in mind, we built a Human Certification Tool at Authory.
Our technology is suited for this kind of certification. By nature of our tool, our thousands of customers upload hundreds, sometimes thousands, examples of their own writing. From this, we create “fingerprints” that describe a writing tone and style. One author can have multiple fingerprints. To verify you wrote the content, we compare a piece of writing with what’s in your body of work.
It was a strange tool for us to build, one we’re not sure we wanted to, but if the industry demands it, we’re happy to do it, and we’re doing it well. We’re successfully determining if content is written by a human more accurately than OpenAI.
So, if your editor, boss, or dream job needs to verify you wrote your own content, we’re happy to provide that option.
The speculative future
So far, I’ve made the argument we know AI can’t replace writers, yet and there’s still a vital role for the journalist and writer.
Where does that leave us, today?
You can find multiple resources on how to use AI as a drafting tool if you’re a writer. The idea here is by short cutting a research or synthesis process, a writer can know more, and say more, just faster.
Here at Authory, we’re using AI tools to let our audience ask questions about their own content. Want to know when you quoted that-one-guy in 2014? Ask our AI assistant. Want to compare your style of writing over the years? We can tell you.
We’re not going to shy away from the fact that general intelligence is what the industry is seeking and the goal of a technology like this is to eat away at some of the grindy aspects of content production.
If you’re an established journalist, a master of a niche, or have a reputation, it’s not such a big deal that AI could eat jobs like writing product descriptions, listicles, or how-to articles. But for many writers this is how you get your start, how you pay the bills, cut your teeth. And those are the jobs we worry about.
Do I have a silver bullet that’s going to keep you “above the API” in the next three, five, ten years? No. But I suggest building your reputation and finding what makes you uniquely you and human. In a world where robots can give instruction and synthesize, it’s exactly our humanness that’s going to stand out.
Eric Hauch is the founder of Authory. He is a serial entrepreneur who has been active in the content industry for more than a decade, having worked for the Financial Times and Axel Springer among others.
