GrammarPhile Blog

To loosely paraphrase the opening sentence of Pride and Prejudice, “It is a movie trope universally acknowledged that a being in possession of advanced technology must be in want of some common sense.” A few cases in point: The invading aliens in War of the Worlds succumbed to ordinary bacteria. The nefarious schemes of not only the aliens (again) in M. Night Shyamalan’s Signs but also the Wicked Witch of the West (advanced technologies: flying broom and monkeys) were thwarted by nothing more than water … what a world, what a world. And even though 2001: A Space Odyssey’s HAL 9000 calmly asserted that his disconnection was something he could not allow to happen, the supercomputer failed to anticipate Dave Bowman’s reentry through the emergency airlock to do just that.

In each of these cinematic examples, a supposedly superior technology was laid low by something it seems a superior technology really should have been a bit more aware of. And if life imitates art, is AI—arguably our most advanced technology to date—destined to be tripped up by something equally innocuous? If so, what might be its kryptonite? Those in the know have variously proposed data quality, context, sarcasm, intuition, hallucinations, and hands. (As images generated by AI reveal, it struggles to identify what constitutes a human hand.)

I just received an email from a prominent law firm advertising an upcoming seminar on the latest promises of a new generation of computing. Most business people would recognize the firm’s name, but of course we’ll not mention it here for fear of a gigantic lawsuit, or at least a C&D letter. (They’re LAWYERS, after all!)

The first paragraph briefly described the great power and many advantages coming with next-gen computing and ended with this sentence:

"It's impossible to understate the power this new form of computing will demonstrate." (Italics are mine.)

See the flub? It’s akin to that common mistake one hears so often: “I could care less.” I am pretty sure the article was AI-generated, for it had a plethora of repeated concepts, a lot of strung out phrasing, and plenty of word salad to get the count up to some stated goal.

This law firm doesn’t look so great when they blithely let grammatical mistakes like this one go unpunished. They meant “overstate,” of course, as they meant to say something like “You just can’t find the words to express how great the impacts of such power will be. Even if you guessed a billion times faster and a trillion times cheaper, you’d still be low."

There’s a common joke among writers: “It’s easier to start over than to copyedit.”

Nobody laughs at the joke. They mostly just nod their heads, as if to say, “It’s funny cause it’s true.” Copyediting poor writing is a little like trying to clean a hoarded house without removing the hoard beforehand.

The interesting bit about that joke is that it came about in response to human writing, and not even necessarily poor writing. But it applies to AI-generated copy as well.

As a team of writers, proofreaders, editors, copywriters, and copyeditors who’ve seen the good, the bad, and the dreadful across nearly every industry, organization size, and type of content imaginable, we feel compelled to reveal a few downsides.

The Downsides of AI-Generated Text

We understand the impetus for using AI-generated copy. It’s fast; it’s cheap; it’s easy. It doesn’t talk back.

But these aren’t hypothetical downsides. They’re not reactive, “We’re afraid for our jobs” types. They’re not projected insecurity (i.e., “A machine can write better than moi? Better blow it to pieces.”). These are downsides we’ve already encountered, many times.

For example, consider a proposal one of our beloved clients recently submitted. We are intimately familiar with their voice, their products, their style guide, their content types, and their business model. It was immediately clear that the copy was AI-generated. It was also clear that to move it from what ranged between awkward and nonsensical to succinct and logical, we couldn’t just proofread it. We had to copyedit it…heavily.

Upon review, we made an estimated 5 times as many necessary edits as normal for jobs of the same length from this client. Oof.

If you haven’t heard the news that AI is positioned to kick all human writers to the curb after scoffing at their turtle-like slowness, then you may be living under a rock (and for that, we salute you).

Every Tom, Mick, and Sherry is writing an opinion piece, post, or pop song about the recently released ChatGPT, a chatbot with the tagline “Optimizing Language Models for Dialogue.” It claims to be able to “answer follow-up questions, admit its mistakes, challenge incorrect premises, and reject inappropriate requests.”

It’s certainly not the first AI-writing generator, and it won’t be the last. So what’s different? Why the hoopla and apocalyptic predictions?

In a sentence: Because compared to many of its predecessors and peers, ChatGPT produces intelligible, lightning-fast writing, even based on loose prompts. Poor human writing (the kind content mills produce) doesn’t stand a chance.

That’s exactly why we’re not concerned about AI-writing or writers’ jobs (or ours). We deal in quality—the intuitive, agile, creative kind that machines will never be able to fully emulate.

When it comes down to it, we can’t even agree with the delivery promise of AI-writing: quick, adaptable, readable writing. It’s like giving a candle as a housewarming gift to an intimate old friend. It checks the box, but there’s no rapport, no true depth, and no personalization. (This analogy doesn’t even tackle the moral ambiguity of how AI-generated copy sources material without accreditation.)

Many professionals and job seekers think that technology enhanced with artificial intelligence (AI) will automate most (if not all) occupations within the next decade or so, while others aren’t yet convinced.

Some professionals believe that grammar-checking software, for instance, is the first step to replacing human writers and editors. And then there are services that will auto-write “textual content” for you.

But what do you think? Do you think that robots or software enhanced with AI will be able to completely replace human writers, editors, and proofreaders in the near or distant future? Keep reading to learn more.

How Grammar-Checking Software Works

Ready or not, we’ve already begun living in the fourth industrial revolution: the age of artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning, robots, biotechnology, and smart devices. And in this new era, a lot of individuals are becoming concerned that robots will start stealing and destroying jobs across industries, replacing their human counterparts, and that they’ll eventually run everything in the world … or at the very least change the way that everything operates.