For the record, what you read here is from me, not from robots

This is how a lot of today’s Internet is created. Since this is a growing concern, let’s talk about that briefly.

I started writing professionally as a minimum-wage part-timer at a newspaper when I was a freshman in college. The video terminals on which we typed our news stories were barely smart enough to retain what we wrote. The idea that a machine could make up articles of its own would have seemed like pure science fiction to us.

I’ve been paid quite nicely for my writing over the years. I was first paid poorly as a newspaper writer and editor (and eventually publisher). I was paid far better for the ridiculous spin that I wrote when I was a political consultant. And I’ve been working for myself — for free — on this website for the past 15 years.

But I want to be clear about this. The idea that I would need a machine to write for me after all these years is actually offensive to me. Whether you like my writing or not, it’s my writing. My words. My style. My ideas.

Do I use AI software for writing? No.

Words matter to me. Writing matters to me. And I’m deluded enough to believe I do it well enough that no software could write quite like me anyway.

I write everything you see here. Everything.

In the last year or so, I’ve been using software to spot typos, grammatical errors and other simple inconsistencies that I might have overlooked. That’s because I’m too lazy to read my own work and edit it.

But on the bigger use of artificial intelligence software to write, I want to be clear:

— All of the ideas you see here are my own, for good or for bad.

— All of the writing you see here is my own, whether you like the writing or not.

— No AI software has ever written an article for me. No AI software will ever write an article for me.

(For the record, I do love em dashes to set apart parenthetical material — like this — but I’ve been doing that since long before any AI software existed. So leave my em dashes alone.)

What about image generators?

I use software to generate a lot of graphics. I also use image generators to edit photos.

Why?

Because I don’t have a staff of artists to produce customized art for free. No artist would be capable of cranking out all the graphics that I need and no artist would be willing to do it for free. Since I publish my own site and don’t make a nickel from it, that’s rather important to me.

Before image generators came along, I was using some pretty terrible artwork on my articles much of the time. I used whatever I could find online — and the legality of some of what I used was questionable, to put the matter most delicately. I simply couldn’t afford anybody to create what I needed and most of what I could find didn’t fit my needs very well.

So image generators have saved my neck.

But the ideas are mine. I often go through dozens of iterations of artwork to find what I want. I can’t just tell some software to whip up something. I typically spend as much time conceiving the ideas and trying many variations of them — to find something I can live with — as I do writing articles.

If you don’t think that’s a reasonable use of software, you need to quit looking at anything online — or even in printed publications — because people have been using Photoshop and various other image manipulation tools in similar ways for decades.

What about the future of AI?

When I see AI-generated writing, it typically strikes me as banal and soulless. The ideas are terribly conventional. The writing is cookie-cutter. It’s boring.

If all you want is for an article to sum up some key information and communicate it grammatically, AI software can usually do that job. But since it does fail at times — and you never quite know when it’s failed — I find that it’s pretty useless.

As a human writer, I don’t feel threatened by AI “writing.”

I’m concerned about the fact that a staggering percentage of people have little interest in reading novel ideas and have little patience for reading long-form writing. But I find that the people who are interested in ideas and like to read can typically tell the difference between writing from a human and slop from a machine.

So the truth is that I’m more concerned about a dumbed-down audience than I am about software taking my place.

The bottom line is that I’m far more concerned about human stupidity and laziness than I am about artificial intelligence.

If you train your mind by reading intelligent ideas and decent writing from humans, you’re never going to have to wonder whether you’re reading something from me or from some robot.

Note: You can find a permanent version of this linked from the main page of my website right here.