It is 2024 and technology is at its peak. AI is one of the biggest things and it is always being talked about everywhere. One of the biggest AI’s is ChatGPT which was released on November 30, 2022 and two months later, it already had well over 100 million users making it the fastest growing company while also making a big impact in humanity. AI has a reason for having this much popularity. It can do numerous things that humans can, and sometimes, it can do it better. What AI is best at, especially ChatGPT, is writing essays, stories, songs, emails, code, and pretty much everything else; so the million dollar question here is: is it worthwhile to write when you can just ask AI to do it for you?
There are many benefits to writing with AI, one of them being time. You can give an AI a prompt and it will write whatever you want about that prompt in seconds, so if you are in a rush and forgot to write something for whatever reason, AI is best at saving you time. Adding to this, you might have an artist block, not knowing what/how to write or being stuck on an idea and not being able to develop it is frustrating, so reaching to AI for help is helpful.
On the other hand, these AI tools cannot replace human writing. As Arlan Bartfeld, a 9th grader at The Jewish Leadership Academy, said, “ “AI doesn’t write very good pieces, it doesn’t have the same anecdotes that a human can put in their writing. Humans can think outside the box unlike AI.’” His peer, Jake Kravetz, agreed: “… the main problem is AI error, people trust what an AI has to say more than humans have to say.” AI will write a story but with no voice, feelings and emotions.
Writing has been with us, humans, forever. We have been telling stories and experiences through writing which helps us know what happened in our history. Furthermore, writing has major benefits. Writing can make you smarter, teaches you to think, reason, and articulate your ideas, which is not only a way to express them but rather a way to understand what you think. Writing about your problems solves half of them which helps with clear thinking, something that is very valuable, especially in today’s world. No type of AI will write the exact story you want to tell because ninety percent of the time the story unfolds as you write it. As Paul Graham, a computer scientist and essayist, said: “A good writer doesn’t just think, and then write down what he thought, a good writer will almost always discover new things in the process of writing.”
As a result, writing is always challenging and sometimes even hard. For that reason, we might need help or some sort of inspiration, but because writing is hard, it teaches you to think, something a bot is incapable of doing. Writing makes you expand your ideas and puts your brain to work. You might know what you want to talk about and how to talk about it but as you write it, it can change and end up being even better than what you had in mind. At the end of the day, AI is here to help and make things easier, even so, easy isn’t always better.
