Writing well is a challenging task.  Whether you are the sort of person who meticulously plans their words for hours or days or the sort who writes off the top of your head and then spends hours or days editing, tweaking, agonizing, and polishing, getting from “thing you want to say” to “polished text” can take some time and some commitment.

It is also spectacularly, incredibly, worth doing.  The time spent learning to write well, of improving what you write by understanding what works and what doesn’t, the commitment to being a better writer, the whole process involved, makes you not just a better writer but also a more thoughtful person and better overall communicator.

It is a lifetime self-improvement project.

You can, perhaps, imagine my chagrin today when I was doing a little bit of online digging about AI detection tools and I stumbled across a website called “WriteHuman” which, for the low, low, price of $12/month will sanitize your AI-generated prose into something that will pass for human instead of being detected by AI detection tools.

Hole.

E.

Schitt.

Lemme get this straight.  You’re a human, right?  And you write text, by default, that sounds like it was written by a human, right?  You wish to write a paper or an essay or a letter or a script or a story or a poem or an email and you are too. what, lazy(?) to compose the text yourself so you ask a robot to write it for you but, in the end, it sounds like a robot, so you hire a DIFFERENT ROBOT to make it sound more passably like a human?

Am I taking crazy pills?

Thanks to email spammers, we can’t have nice email.  Thanks to phone scammers we can’t trust phone calls.  Thanks to social media oligarchs we can’t have functional relationships with information or loved ones.  Thanks to the shitbag contingent of our society, we all spend half our days doing multi-factor authentication, trying to prove we are human to CAPTCHAS, and wondering if any of this online thing has been worth it since, like, 2005.  And now we enter into an era in which increasingly sophisticated fake content will be spewing forth into the world on the one hand, efforts to detect the bullshit will trail behind, and more advanced tools will be developed to counter the countermeasures until nobody actually says or does or shares anything online again that isn’t digitally altered and there is no way to know what is real and what is completely trash.

And yes, your “AI” generated content, all of it, every goddamn pixel, every fucking sentence, it’s all trash.  It is all worse than if you had done it yourself, no matter how inexpertly.  If you “suck at _______” (drawing, writing, photography, video, whatever) your amateur efforts are still better than whatever polished turds come forth from the algorithmic-piracy-generator.

If you are willing to pay a computer to make the text you didn’t write sound like a person wrote it rather than just being a person and writing it, think twice.  You will never become a better writer by doing this.  You will never develop your own voice.  You will never actually SAY a single thing.  You will be silenced even if you post hundreds of thousands of words because none of those words will have actually come from you.  The personality of the creator is always lost in generated content.  100% of the time.

“AI writers” aren’t writers.

“AI musicians” aren’t musicians.

“AI artists” aren’t artists.

They never will be, no matter how they gussy it up and act like “prompt engineer” is a worthy thing to aspire to be.  Instead of trying to become a better writer of prompts, why not try to become, oh, I dunno…  A BETTER WRITER.

Geezzzzzzzzz I hate this tech…