EARLY this year, I attended an out-of-town event participated in by representatives from key sectors.
I immediately switched to my TEDx listening mode, as I was excited to hear updates from the guest speakers who were prime movers in their respective fields.
As I listened to the speakers, I noticed something odd. About three of them had similar speeches. In fact, too similar for comfort.
From the introduction, “As I stand before you today…” to the call to action, “We are bound by our collective commitment and must forge ahead…”
All the speeches had almost the same key points, tone, and build-up. It seemed they were written by the same person — or perhaps, the same app.
This is the dilemma facing many of our writers today: a seemingly growing reliance on AI-powered writing tools.
The question is no longer whether to use AI. The concern now is what type of writing app to use – ChatGPT, Gemini, Jenni AI, Grok, and dozens more.
Please don’t get me wrong. AI is a powerful tool. It can produce well-crafted stories, speeches, and vlog content. Heck, it can even whip up doctoral dissertations and legal briefs.
Major advancements in AI over the past two years have made it at par, or perhaps even better than some seasoned writers.
No writer worth his or her salt, however, would admit this. This is a reality that we must accept and confront. The age of the AI writer is upon us.
This was the subject of a serious discussion I had with my sister, who is an experienced online writer. I asked her: Who do you think is the better writer – AI or human?
Without any hesitation, she said, “Of course, humans will always be the better writers, hands-down.”
She had a rude awakening after getting a message from a co-writer telling her she was recently let go by her Manila-based client.
And the reason: the company’s experiment to use AI to write articles was a success. Thus, management no longer had the need for human writers. Thank you for your service.
But this is the catch. Those who often use AI writing apps or have studied how they the work will notice that the articles they churn out come out as too structured and formulaic.
Too perfect, in fact. Yes, there are also apps that “humanize” AI-generated content to make them sound more natural.
But they still lack the spontaneity, mood, and tone of articles written by humans. We can sense that these pieces, perfect as they may seem, were made by machine learning algorithms.
Okay, others will say that these AI apps are not primarily designed for creative tasks but for more practical, data-driven work such as quarterly reports or academic papers.
However, I believe that the goal of writing is not to achieve perfection in the written word. Its purpose is to bleed the mind and stir the soul — and give birth to ideas.
While it is true that there is no such thing as an original idea, it is that excruciating process of thinking, of piecing things together, of finding and creating patterns, that defines our thoughts.
The articles that we write may not always have the punch, novelty, or emotional depth that our readers expect. But at least we can claim full ownership over them.
Thinking is an amalgamation of all the information we gather using our senses and distilling them to their core.
I spent almost two hours writing this piece, which would have taken ChatGPT perhaps less than a minute to produce.
Call me old-fashioned or simply stubborn. I’ll continue to wring this mass between my ears until it runs dry.
Or until I finally give in and ask ChatGPT to draft me an article on why I should ask it to write this piece instead of doing it myself.
But who knows? It just might give me a convincing answer.