Is Generative AI a Tool or Replacement for Writers? A Writer’s Take

Written By Samantha Drake
Man Talking to Robot

As a writer, I don’t understand the push to use artificial intelligence to craft creative content. Finding the right word and developing the perfect sentence can be a thrilling, aggravating and downright painful process. Don’t take that away from us!

To paraphrase other critics, I don’t need AI to help me write an article—I need AI to do my laundry. But AI is churning out content for all kinds of writers, and it’s not going anywhere except forward. Should writers who focus on business content be worried? Excited? I tend to be a late adopter of new technology, so for now I’m mainly curious about what AI-assisted chatbots can do for me.

AI has pros and cons for business writers and the organizations that employ them. Generative AI tools like ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot and Google Gemini are just that—tools. AI can be used to draft business content such as emails and reports, and offer grammar corrections and style suggestions. It can gather research, summarize large amounts of information and break down complex subjects into plain English. AI chatbots could be a valuable time-saver for writers.

Would I trust an AI tool completely to do all these things? No. I might write a first draft using information gathered by an AI chatbot. Regardless of how accurate and comprehensive the AI output appeared, I’d confirm every fact and do additional research to ensure nothing important was missing. I’d also tweak the language according to my writing style. So there goes most of the time saved…

In the business context, one of the biggest drawback to AI-assisted writing I see currently is that the technology is evolving so rapidly that serious legal issues are very much up in the air.

News organizations are experimenting with generative AI to automate the creation of news and feature stories, and research story ideas. Other news organizations are giving AI companies access to their content to train the chatbots that produce the AI results. For example, OpenAI, the information tech company that created ChatGPT, has partnered with The Financial Times to train the AI chatbots that gather content. OpenAI also has agreements with The Associated Press and Business Insider, among others, according to The New York Times.

Other news organizations don’t want AI companies using their content. In April, eight daily newspapers across the country, including The New York Daily News, The Chicago Tribune and The San Jose Mercury News, sued OpenAI and Microsoft for allegedly stealing their content. The newspapers argue the companies’ chatbots often grab entire articles from behind subscription paywalls without linking back to the source, The New York Times reported. Companies that deploy AI chatbots to access content without permission do not pay the publisher subscription fees, often do not properly credit the news organization and may violate publisher copyrights.

Here’s another issue: AI tools rely on the content used to train them so if that collection of content is less than comprehensive, the results generated will also be limited. How do you know if the results your chosen AI chatbot has offered are sufficient for your needs?

AI-assisted writing tools tend to be framed as either a friend, as a supportive instrument at a writer’s disposal, or a foe, as a cost-saving replacement for writers. But it doesn’t have to be one or the other. It’s up to the writer to decide if the AI-generated research and content is credible, if AI tools stifle or spur creativity and, ultimately, if AI writing tools are worth it. At the end of the day, what matters to clients? High-quality, trust-worthy writing that fulfills their goals.

I still wouldn’t mind it if AI could somehow be configured to do my laundry. But I’d be checking every piece of clothing to make sure it’s clean—at least until the AI washer bot proved itself.

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