The opinions expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not reflect the views of her campus.
This article was written by a student writer from MSU’s Her Campus Chapter.
A few weeks ago, while waiting for a creative writing conference, I heard a surprising comment about artificial intelligence.
A few students nearby were discussing writer’s block. While I was eavesdropping, one student said (loudly!), “I’m lazy so I usually just let ChatGPT fill in the rest.”
I’d like to think I’m not completely naive, but I know that many students use ChatGPT to write essays, answer questions, and do whatever else AI does for academics. I’m doing it. While I don’t necessarily approve of this practice, I can understand why students would rely on AI to help them complete their homework. Many AI software speeds up the process of confusing and tedious tasks. This is the main selling point.
But this stranger’s comment puzzled me for days after the meeting. Even ignoring the environmental harm and job theft caused by AI generators, I wondered why anyone would want to feed their ideas and imagination into a bot. Immediately after this incident, I did some research and learned that AI has been dividing the writing community for almost two years, ever since OpenAI released ChatGPT in November 2022.
On September 1, 2024, National Novel Writing Month, also known as NaNoWriMo, posted answers to several questions on its website, including a controversial (now deleted) statement about AI. “We also want to make clear our belief that strong condemnation of artificial intelligence has undertones of classism and ableism, and that questions about the use of AI are intertwined with questions about privilege.” The statement reads:
Many writers publicly opposed this statement, and some even deactivated their NaNoWriMo accounts. Others were quick to connect that NaNoWriMo is sponsored by ProWritingAid, a writing software that recently added generative AI called AI Sparks. Perhaps NaNoWriMo’s AI “neutrality” statement was born out of appeasing sponsors rather than ethical concerns.
This isn’t the first time a popular online writing space has acknowledged AI, whether positively or negatively. In February 2023, just three months after ChatGPT was launched, online fantasy and science fiction publication Clarkesworld Magazine temporarily stopped posting writing due to an overwhelming influx of AI-generated content. did. Neil Clarke, editor-in-chief of Clarkesworld, theorized that these AI posts were caused by “hustlers” looking to make a quick buck from the magazine’s payment system.
In my opinion, trying to pass off AI writing as a job for money is very anti-artistic, but I understand why some people rely on ChatGPT to write. may be the answer to your first question. Soon, other questions about AI for writing arose, some of which couldn’t be clearly answered on the internet. So I asked other writers for their opinions.
Creative writing professor Tim Conrad teaches classes at MSU on prose, history of writing, editing and publishing, and more. He recently taught an activity called “Bot or Not?” in his Creative Writing History and Theory class. Students read several poems and decide whether the author is a human or an AI software. However, students usually make incorrect guesses.
“Our preconceptions about what prose and poetry produced by bots are like. [differs from] What does it actually look like?” Conrad said. “Why do we think it can only be human? Is it a surprise? Is it the use of certain things that are unlikely? Is it the sophistication of language or innuendo?”
Ideally, Conrad said, writers should delve deeper into their own imagination and creativity, writing art that can never be meaningfully replicated by a machine.
“Seriously entertaining AI as a work of art is completely rudimentary,” he says. “If you have the same short story written by a human, imagine for a moment that a bot wrote the exact same story. What matters to us is whether there is a human-created story in that story.”
Not all writers believe that all uses of AI are equivalent to minimizing their own work. Gwen Pratt, a senior minor in human biology (a pre-veterinary medicine course), is involved in novel writing at MSU. Pratt, who has used both ChatGPT and Character.ai briefly, said he sometimes uses AI generators, similar to searching for prompt creation on Google.
“(ChatGPT) helps refine the prompts you get from search engines. Even when creating prompts, what matters most is your imagination and how your characters interact,” they said . “Character.ai is a little shaky because it shows examples, but it still feels like explaining a character or showing a scene to a friend, so I think it’s still okay.”
Pratt said writers need to stick to AI’s main benefits: rapid generation of information and grammar checking. They also think readers need to realize that AI is a “broad topic.”
“There are a lot of good things, but if people use it to speed things up, [the work process] Otherwise, things can go wrong in terms of quality,” Pratt said. “If you haven’t, I highly recommend checking it out because it will help you see what you can do to advance your world, your work, and your story.”
Personally, I don’t plan on using AI or NaNoWriMo any time soon. I still believe that writers should avoid using AI, even if it means shouting into the wind. But I learned a lot about the intersection of AI and writing. It all came down to a comment I overheard once.
