Can I Use AI to Write For Me?

Asking for a Friend...

Yeah, no.

Fun fact: I used AI to generate this image to prove a point: it's obvious. Homeboy has three hands. He's sleeping on two and a third has morphed out of the sheets. File this in the Nightmare-inducing Uncanny Valley file. Not only can AI be obvious, it can be pretty purple, and, frankly just plain extra. I poked ChatGPT with this prompt: Write a 100 word story about an author who attempts to write 3 books in one year.

Here is the result:

Darren announced, boldly, that he would write three books in one year. The first poured out of him in a fever, pages stacking like bricks. The second dragged, every sentence wrestled into place, but still, it lived. By the time he faced the third, his hands trembled, his mind frayed. He woke early, slept late, whispering lines to himself like prayers. At midnight on December 31st, he typed the final word. Three books, one year. The triumph was real, though he barely remembered the man who had declared it. He had written himself into someone new.

Not gonna lie, that last line kind of got me at the heartstrings. Also, did Darren type his final word at 11:59 PM on December 31st or midnight on January 1st. Because if it's the latter, Darren did not reach his goal. Two books is still incredibly impressive. I think we can all agree on that.

In any case, no, you cannot use Chat or Claude or any of them to do the work. YOU are the writer, not Claude—unless your name is actually Claude. Also, see that em dash there? It's been said that em dashes are a semi-reliable indicator that AI has been used because the text used to train AI models has an overrepresentation em dashes. Other folks say it's a myth. Who knows. I actually don't care, because neither you nor I should be using it to do the actual writing. A question here or there? Sure (but always get a second opinion elsewhere on the web). Need clarification around grammatical issues or syntax? Why not? But to sit there and prompt some AI platform to do the work you need to be doing? Eh eh.

If you've made it this far, you know the drill. It's time to get writing right now!