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Writing is more than generating text
A newsletter is a very personal thing. When I subscribe to yours, I am putting my trust in you that you will send me something of your making and that it will be a result of your own labour, your lived experience, and your expertise.
When you use AI to generate text and send that to me through your newsletter without announcing it as such, you are of course disappointing me, but you are also underselling yourself. I know there is a bunch of advice out there about “using AI to write” and make your life easy, but human connection is supposed to take effort. It’s not supposed to be automated.
The advice that works for content farms that are only interested in filling web pages with keyword-laden text is not advice that will do an actual writer any good. In a world where many are using ChatGPT to “write”, what differentiates you — the writer — from the rest, is the fact that you can actually write. You don’t have to flush your uniqueness down the drain by jumping on this already creaky bandwagon.
Be a person, not the machine-generated approximation of one. There is a difference between writing and generating text. It should not be forgotten, least of all by a writer.
I was recently talking with a writer friend about what makes me feel there is something icky about using ChatGPT (or a similar tool) to “write”…
