I couldn’t care less whether you use ChatGPT or any other generative AI to write. In the end, it doesn’t make a difference. The preciousness with which many treat the subject (including myself, until recently) \u2014 as if there were some intrinsic quality worthy of preservation in purely human text \u2014 is unfounded.<\/p>\n
I know it’s a controversial opinion. I ask for your patience and that you approach it in a strict sense, meaning to set aside other issues regarding the subject, such as ethics and environmental concerns. With that said, I will now try to make my case.<\/p>\n
If you think ChatGPT writes better than you, you\u2019re probably right. From my perspective as a reader, it\u2019s (still?) easy to tell when a text is generated by AI and when it\u2019s the product of a human being\u2019s imagination \u2014 or mostly, at least.<\/p>\n
Still in that role, it\u2019s obvious that I take this perception into account when deciding whether to read something or not. And, also almost needless to say, I much prefer human-written text, or those in which the humanity of the writer manifests itself.<\/p>\n
The preciousness of those averse to AI-generated texts stems from a flawed premise: that 100% human text is always better.<\/p>\n
Not only is there a lot of very low-quality text, but there\u2019s also a lot of text that, even when written by capable humans and coming out as intended, is still bad. It resembles a machine-generated one. This predates ChatGPT. Websites and blogs that love Google\u2019s algorithm, for example, have been publishing texts for years that hardly differ from the slop generated by AI. Corporate emails, reports, earnings news, and sports results\u2026 there are many examples.<\/p>\n
Sometimes we have no choice but to read bad texts. Often, it\u2019s a choice \u2014 I would ignore that birthday note<\/a> that Alex received, for instance.<\/p>\n Life is not a grand prose or poetry contest, unfortunately.<\/p>\n In these situations, does it matter whether the author used AI? Whether the text was partially or fully written by a human or by AI? What matters is the quality of the text presented to the reader, which doesn\u2019t change. It remains a bad text.<\/p>\n A specific example. The other day I came across this news<\/a> on the site Phone Arena<\/cite>, titled \u201cThe unannounced Samsung Galaxy S25 Edge is already available for pre-order in the UK at a sky-high price.\u201d It\u2019s written by a person, and nothing on the webpage suggests the aid of generative AI.<\/p>\n The news has 664 words. The price only appears after 457 words, meaning the \u201cintroduction\u201d (fluff) occupies 68.8% of the text. I could bet it\u2019s because Google would penalize texts with too few words.<\/p>\n It\u2019s ironic, but AI did a much better job of answering the question that the Phone Arena<\/cite> article aims to address (even if drawing from sources like Phone Arena<\/cite> itself). Perplexity delivers the price of the phone after 58 words<\/a>.<\/p>\n AI has entered a game in which we, humans, cannot win. What game? The game of mediocre, bad text.<\/p>\n ***<\/p>\n I understand the feeling of betrayal that the press has regarding generative AI. Newspapers around the world have had their \u201ccorpus\u201d absorbed and regurgitated by chatbots that, as the silly example above demonstrates, often do a better job than the source from which they draw.<\/p>\n