Saved by Keely Adler
What AI Teaches Us About Good Writing
But the technology’s capacity for imitation will likely continue to improve: New Yorker staff writer Kyle Chayka observed that ChatGPT was not very effective at mimicking his own writing voice, but the AI startup, Writer, created a bot trained on his own writing to produce text in his voice that, while not perfect, was still “unnervingly
... See moreLaura Hartenberger • What AI Teaches Us About Good Writing
“So what?” is the common refrain of writing teachers. “Why should your reader care?” A key way that good writing achieves connection is by creating stakes, or engaging the reader by showing them why your ideas matter.
Fiction creates stakes through establishing consequences — what does the protagonist stand to lose in their journey? Argumentative... See more
Fiction creates stakes through establishing consequences — what does the protagonist stand to lose in their journey? Argumentative... See more
Laura Hartenberger • What AI Teaches Us About Good Writing
When I write, I imagine reaching up to a higher plane to access my thoughts and assign words to them, yet the words I find are approximate and never capture the ideas as fully as they appear in my mind. This is why writing feels so hard to me: Its labor involves grasping for a perfect translation and always falling short. But ChatGPT reminds us... See more
Laura Hartenberger • What AI Teaches Us About Good Writing
As we explore new applications for large language models and consider how well they can optimize our communication, AI challenges us to reflect on the qualities we truly value in our prose. How do we measure the caliber of writing, and how well does AI perform?
Laura Hartenberger • What AI Teaches Us About Good Writing
We tend to admire writing whose predominant feature is experimentalism, but readability seems to matter to us, too — how great can a piece of writing be if few have the capacity or inclination to finish it?
Laura Hartenberger • What AI Teaches Us About Good Writing
To write well, you need the specificity of perspective that comes from communicating critically with others over an extended time. AI might make writing faster, but figuring out who we are in relation to others cannot be accelerated.
We may see writing as equal to thought, but it is also synonymous with power. Allowing AI to write for us gives away... See more
We may see writing as equal to thought, but it is also synonymous with power. Allowing AI to write for us gives away... See more
Laura Hartenberger • What AI Teaches Us About Good Writing
language is a lens, and our thoughts and perceptions are almost certainly shaped in some way by its conventions and metaphors. It shows us that writing influences our thoughts even as we use it to describe them.
Laura Hartenberger • What AI Teaches Us About Good Writing
It’s difficult to determine a text’s quality without considering the context in which it was written.
Laura Hartenberger • What AI Teaches Us About Good Writing
When it lacks instructions to imitate a particular voice, it presumably imitates all of us, averaging our voices together into an indistinct default. Conversing with the chatbot feels like encountering someone you recognize but have never met — a voice of the masses, distant yet familiar.