AI writing tools

Just a quick rant.

Seriously, they can’t achieve anything substantial. Instead of focusing on making an interoperable product, the AI rewriters are the new rage. The computational costs are massive, and even if they have access to the API, it will be difficult to pull this through. Most of the times, you’d easily cross the word-limits.

Most tools are online/cloud based and proprietary. They don’t generate words de-novo, but are trained on web-scraping, and there is a distinct possibility that open repositories of ideas (like this blog) is probably indexed too. The generative model calculates the statistical probability of the occurrence of the word, and transformers (as designed by Google) just allow parallel processing. These probabilities are therefore prone to “hallucinations” – which don’t make much sense. As such, Open AI is investing even more to generate “human feedback” and they are utilising even more parameters to “fine tune” the language nuances.

As with any AI tool, these are blunt instruments. Even if you fall into the trap of using a “powerful tool”, invest in the basics. The biggest impediment is analysis paralysis and trying to get your masterpiece in one go. This blog post is a rumbling rant typed in one continuous fashion using a brilliant mechanical keyboard. This allows me to type faster, and usually at the pace at which I think. AI assistive writers are only capable of generating “SEO based” writing samples, which will please most people, and not someone looking for substantial reporting.

I looked at two of them earlier today, and it was apparent that there was a blog post with a narrative spun around it. Not that I trusted the author (who was kind enough to mention it with a disclaimer that he was an angel investor), but I was curious to check out the hype that built into it. Honestly, it is not difficult to build a product if you have to just latch on to the API. Remember, Microsoft owns the API end points, which can switch off the access anytime, and you’d be left cribbing on Reddit or the forums (which ironically will be indexed by ChatGPT during its next scrape!) Twitter shafted the developers and it is impossible to rely on the private corporations; especially if the ownership changes.

Should you rely on the AI writing tools? No.

Use your brains and proper “research” before you wish to write. Use the writing process itself as a generative concept to make it easier for you in the long-term. Incidentally, I am writing this after writing about ChatGPT elsewhere. That is a collaboration with one of my favourite authors, and he kindly consented to experiment around technology. I will share the link in the future blog post around this. The only AI assistance I use is for the “grammar correction” Outwrite. This is because it helps keep the language intact (especially around commas or spelling correction) in real time.