During COVID-19, one of my more vivid memories was designing. At 3:00 AM, I was planted in my chair and hunched over an ancient MacBook. My entire house had been asleep for at least five hours by that point, and they believed I was asleep as well. I sat in that chair for so long that my lower back ached, and a weird adhesion developed between my legs and the chair.
Yet, for whatever reason, the interface design enamored me. I used a third-party program called Nicepage to create a photo gallery showcasing three years of photography. This collage featured images from across Southern California: deployed national guardsmen during the Black Lives Matter protests, masked politicians at the onset of the pandemic, and still photographs of fishermen in downtown Santa Monica.
I tried to emulate the photojournalism seen in the and split the pictures into large, bold headlines to give it a more newspaper feel.
In my experience working with other people, this entire process is uniquely human. To sit there for hours on end, moving text boxes a centimeter to the left, or to labor over minute syntax, requires an almost fantastical level of devotion unknown to AI. Anybody who has ever written anything knows that their writing tendencies came from years of playing with sentence structures or leveling their tone. Changed by circumstance and practice, writing is distinctively evolutionary.
That is why AI writing feels so hollow.
The large language model didn’t go through anything that materializes real writing. Mark Twain’s time as a steamboat pilot in Missouri, in part, inspired him to write The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Ernest Hemingway was a reporter during the Spanish Civil War and later based For Whom the Bell Tolls off of his journalism.
We all know this. It’s why we all have a visceral reaction when a company releases an AI-slop-filled commercial or why we dismiss an essay riddled with AI patterns. It’s uncreative and boring. It feels like SGA at the free-throw line.
And yet, despite our aversion, AI is slowly encroaching on everything. Disgruntled, burned-out, or just lazy students are relying on it to write their ten-page essay on how property taxes fund education. Professors use it for lesson planning, while researchers rely on its flimsy authority as a baseline for axioms. Law firms and tech companies use it for their menial tasks.
Generally, AI’s allure lies in its expediency.
Read the full article here: https://outspokenoppa.com/the-cons-of-ai-in-journalism/
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