Use all the tools, but own the work
Did you notice the Guardian gleefully chronicles the firing of senior journalists for making errors while using AI? Made-up quotes, plagiarized sentences, they should have known better, they knew better. Now they have to suffer. Full name and picture.
Meanwhile, a broader audience comes to terms that books are sometimes written with the help of AI. Sometimes, with a lot of AI actually. As is the case with “Shy Girl”, a horror romance book first published in the UK, that screams generative AI. After some finger pointing, it didn’t get its US release after all.
The industry is crying foul. The book had four out of five stars on Amazon. Some people actually seemed to like it.
Sometimes, AI writing can be spotted from far away. The rhythm, choice of words, structural things. Then again, there are plenty of strategies to “teach” AI an author’s voice and prompts to avoid AI language and become indistinguishable.
Does it really matter? Cue the essays, where writers come to terms with their craft.
“When reading a Booker Prize-winning novel, we expect every word to have been written by the author, but when reading journalism we assume that both writers and editors played a role.”
That’s by Joshua Rothman in The New Yorker. From books to journalism to movies, we accept collaborative efforts. Now throw in an autocomplete on steroids.
In journalism circles, we have our own “Shy Girl” moment: A Fortune-editor named Nick Lichtenberg got profiled in The Wall Street Journal. He uses AI to write, more articles, faster. After he became semi-famous, the Reuters Institute did an interview with Lichtenberg.
“Doing this over the last nine months or so has pushed me into more original reporting, because all algorithms and all AI products are necessarily backward-looking.”
My take: As long as you write something that people are willing to pay for, with attention or money or both, use all the tools available, from co-workers to Claude Cowork. Don’t use it as a shortcut and call it a day. Use it to write better. Check spelling, facts, arguments.
And hold yourself up to a standard: Are you proud of your work? Is this worthy of anyones time? The more willing you are to proclaim proudly that it was, in fact, you who wrote this, with the help of AI, the better.
Whether Lichtenberg clears that bar is exactly what his interviewers wanted to find out. Marina Adami and Felix Simon press Lichtenberg on his AI use. Is the machine shaping his writing, limiting his choices? They only get so far.
He doesn’t really say it himself, but awkwardly quotes his boss who is saying that he writes 50 percent of the copy by himself. He calls it the “‘50% me’ thing”, which sounds like a rule and a made-up stat. Maybe it’s for the lawyers, so his articles still fall under copyright protection.
Can you drive subscriptions with such articles? “It’s been working for me and for us”, Lichtenberg says.
