There has been a huge amount of information about AI over the past year, and I am bombarded with posts and emails telling me about the advantages of various businesses’ AI services.
I have looked into this, and some of the services I use have AI. But, for the most part, I find the AI contribution unhelpful and often counter productive.
The virtues of AI for writing are normally billed as being able to allow you to produce text quickly.
However, I am a writer. I enjoy writing. I don’t mind spending a bit of time on a post or an article if that is what it takes to make it accurate and readable.
Here are some of the problems I have experienced with AI services.
Inaccurate suggestions
I use Grammarly, which has been very helpful in picking up typos and spelling errors. However, I need to be really careful about following its advice on changing wording.
Frequently, its suggestions change the sense of what I am writing – which can be disastrous if you are writing a legal article! Often, the AI proposed text would make the article legally inaccurate.
Which would not be good for my reputation as a legal writer!
Changing my ‘voice’
When you have been writing for a while, you develop what is known as your ‘voice’ or your individual style of writing.
So, I am not happy with AI suggestions for so called grammatical changes which would change my ‘voice’. After all, who wants all writers to write in the same bland style? Who cares about grammar rules anyway?
Surely, it is more important to make your article readable and convey what you want to convey. Plus I object to having a machine dictate to me what my writing style should be. Shakespeare went his own way, and so will 1!
Helping with customer queries
Another service I use is Intercom, which provides the chat box facility and various other services on my Landlord Law site.
They now have an AI ‘assistant’ which can help you work out how to answer customer queries.
However, in my experience, the suggested responses are invariably wrong. And anyway, I know my business and am better able to draft answers to people than a machine.
We do use the Intercom ‘bot’ facility (which is very useful), but this just sets out pre-drafted answers to common questions. These, though, have all been written by me and do not utilise the AI service.
ChatGPT
After attending a talk on AI last year I signed up to ChatGPT to see whether it could help with my business.
Again, I found it unsatisfactory. Any attempt to use it for legal research resulted in the machine saying either it did not know or coming up with something so basic that it might just as well not have bothered.
I do sometimes use the service for drafting up hashtags for Instagram posts and it is pretty good for helping with recipes. However, I can use the free service for those. (And I have cookbooks).
So, I have just cancelled my subscription.
Landlord Law and Landlord Law Blog posts are AI free
So when reading something on my websites you can rest assured that I have written them myself, thought about them carefully and used my own phraseology.
It’s possible that if the various AI services improve, I may take a look at them again. But at the moment, I don’t really see the point.
What are other writers’ experiences of AI?