Specialist Creators with Small Audiences

[anonymous105]

@Neo

What about a scenario where you’ve thought through an idea and think you have a valuable point of view, but when you write it down it just doesn’t feel right. Your friend Al comes over to help you write it out because he’s a talented English major. You tell him your idea, show him your writing on it and ask him how he would improve it. He writes you the first rough draft, but you don’t like it. You argue back and forth about that not being quite what you meant. He writes you a second draft. You like this draft better but explain to Al that it doesn’t address x possible rebuttal whoever reads it might give. Al makes the corrections and finally writes something you agree with. You have an important meeting to get to so You tell Al to send it out and thank him for the help.

In that scenario, you still took part in the creative process, and although you didn’t write it, Al wouldn’t have came up with the final draft without your input or ideas. Al helped flesh out your thoughts and put them onto paper. And you fully endorsed the final outcome. What do you think about this scenario and why @anonymous105?

I think I forgot to answer this because I got sidetracked by the stuff with Oracle. Also, I am not sure I have a very insightful answer. But I’ll give it a shot.

I think the scenario you describe could be a valuable learning experience for you. But I think I personally would not feel comfortable claiming that I wrote that final draft. IMO it was primarily written by Al, even though I contributed ideas and helped guide him.

I think I felt this way before LLMs and AI were a thing. I have always found the concept of ghost writers weird and kind of off-putting. I would prefer to know who actually wrote stuff. If someone was involved and contributed ideas, they could be a co-author, but they are factually not the sole author.

Also, I think a lot of times people value rough ideas too highly and execution too little. If you come up with a cool idea for a story, but you can’t write it out into a good story, that matters. If you give the idea to AI and AI writes a story with your idea… is that your story? I don’t really think so. What makes it your story is actually writing out the whole story, IMO.

So reconnecting this with AI, if someone posted something and said it was written by AI at their direction, that’s fine. They’re disclosing the process, and if I don’t want to read it I can make an informed decision.

In general, I think one reason I feel this way is I feel strongly about writers having their own voices. I would prefer a writer who made consistent grammatical mistakes but had a strong voice that I liked over a technically correct writer whose voice was bland or forgettable or reminiscent of AI.

Articulating stuff yourself, in your own words, is important. Both for you and in some ways for the people you are communicating with, so that they are accurately engaging with you. IMO it is easy to imagine a scenario where you are making a post and AI or your buddy Al used a word or phrase that you thought looked good but would never have used yourself, and then it turns out that word is contentious. This is not a wild possibility, it has happened on this forum a few times… I think I have raised significant issues with @anonymous45 about individual word choices in other arguments. I think you @Neo have done the same to specific word choices I have made, e.g. “feels comfortable” regarding Elon Musk.

But then you could end up in the situation of arguing about a word or phrase that you did not even pick, and having to defend it. Or you rely on AI to defend it, since AI picked the word, but now your fellow interlocutor really is just arguing with AI, and you may not even be heavily involved anymore.

IMO, how we communicate matters. Individual word choices matter. Making mistakes, communicating poorly, that’s all inevitable and okay. But I worry that one won’t learn from those mistakes if they are passing all of their writing through the filter of an AI that rewrites it all to look “nice.”