The last six posts covered general and specific concerns about depending on AI throughout the writing process. Do I find AI useful to plan, draft, revise, edit, and proofread? Yes. Do I trust AI completely? No. The previous posts explain why.
In closing this series, I share insights based on AI research in business, law, science, psychology, and medicine to summarize the state of AI in the work world.
Benefits
Undoubtedly, AI provides at least four immediate benefits to users:
- Expanded content. AI possesses an unmatched capacity to capture information on any imaginable topic from a vast range of global databases. A researcher can then ask for AI to organize this data into manageable chunks if it already has not.
- Increased speed. AI retrieves data at a remarkably fast pace that a human being cannot. What takes the savviest researcher hours, days, or weeks to collect takes AI seconds.
- Enhanced quality. AI writes well enough in virtually every orthographic language. This quality check closes the articulation gap between nonnative writers of a language and their more fluent counterparts.
- Broadened scrutiny. AI efficiently uncovers plagiarism. Such a feature is invaluable for teachers, editors, and proprietary businesspeople in assigning original work.
Concerns
Every research article I have read about AI has concluded that the writer must beware of many issues, five of which I mention here:
- Credibility. We may get from AI contrived, imprecise, or unreliable information. Therefore, we must verify content we get from multiple, reliable sources.
- Originality. Nothing from AI is original, and though it provides sources from where it gathered material, it might not be citing the primary source. This task has always been the researcher's job and continues to be.
- Transparency. Despite AI programmers' best efforts, AI at times does not provide sources, challenging writers to investigate the source material for themselves.
- Accessibility. AI may provide information that is nearly impossible or impractical to trace. This dilemma forces writers to practice the old adage from journalism: When in doubt, leave it out.
- Compliance. While AI has been around for a few years, it is still a new technology that has left a lot of organizations deciding on how to best use it. In some places, using it equates to an unethical breach of company policy, so writers should know the organizational policy.
