The Irony of Using AI to Find AI
My transparent AI use.
Unless you have been on holiday for a week, you cannot have missed the controversy over Substack’s release of its AI checker. There are privacy concerns, concerns over a witch hunt of writers, and generally a good old moan up on Notes.
First, there is no way this should be a witch hunt for writers who use AI. If you are a writer and not using some of the tools that AI offers, then you are losing time you could spend writing. But there is also a larger issue here: writers who are using AI to produce all their content - 100% AI-generated articles.
Before you think these people don’t exist, I was playing with the tool yesterday, and one of the True Crime writers I have followed for years, who is highly popular, is 100% AI-generated.
Yes, this may be an accident, but it might also be that I have been fooled all this time. That is a concern. Not that I am going to out their name; no, I come from the civilised generation. But I am not reading their writing anymore; I feel, well, conned in a way.
My AI Use
With that in mind, I thought I would be totally honest about my AI use. I don’t want any of my readers feeling as I have.
The primary way I use AI is as an editing partner. It picks up the typos and grammar mistakes I have made. When you have read something many times, your brain starts substituting what is there with what should be there. AI helps me find these problems.
Secondly, AI produces some of my images, especially the background ones I use on my articles. With True Crime, it is very hard to find an image you have the legal rights to share. For obvious reasons, some are too gruesome to share, and I always worry about sharing images of people, especially if a conviction has not been obtained yet.
Finally, I use AI to create an SEO- optimised title and description for my article, which I then copy and paste into the article settings. I have seen a huge increase in outside visitors to my newsletter since doing this.
Occasionally, AI will sort my research notes into a logical order when I have gone down a rabbit hole and have 50 pieces of paper with various handwritten facts on them. Occasionally, it will suggest cases for me to look into so I can roughly connect my Monday and Wednesday articles.
That is it for my writing. Do I feel guilty about using AI to help me with these tasks? Absolutely not. But I don’t feel guilty about putting my clothes in a washing machine rather than going down to the river to clean them, either.
Until next time: Find the time, find the words, find the way.
Sam
AI won’t replace humans, but humans who use AI will replace those who don’t. - Sam Altman
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