Writing with Artificial Intelligence: The Consequences of Humanity's Regression

Illustration: It only takes a few seconds to get a sample essay from artificial intelligence (AI)

Many ways to imitate to "create"

It’s not hard to find copycat content on TikTok. “Content creators” borrow ideas and models from others. Dancer channels on TikTok are just videos of copycats of a trending dance to a trending song without any original dance moves.

Short videos that are exactly the same as those in China, and the comments section is full of comments like: “Imitating but doing it worse,” but still get tens of thousands of likes and millions of views. The content pages are so similar that people think they are all managed by the same person.

All of these are manifestations of the pressure to “post something”, not “have something valuable to post”.

Their goal is views, likes, virality regardless of intellectual value. Their mindset is not to provide content that has any value to the audience, except for mind-blowing entertainment. As long as people are glued to it, that’s fine. And we consume this content too easily.

Or what about going beyond the creative industry to other areas of life?

When switching to a neweducational program, textbook publishers must prepare a series of supplementary materials to convince teachers to switch. From lesson plans, presentations, sample lectures so that teachers can use the new books immediately without having to study much more. Just teach as given.

Or another truth about media: many CEOs force their marketing teams to use AI to create content for social media. Just words, whatever they are. We have entered a world like that, a world of constant hunger, a world that forces people to “make something” instead of “what should it be?”

Writing is not that difficult.

This is a fact about the world: we are used to borrowing, copying, and using existing models. A stereotyped, stereotyped mindset that does not want to admit that we are inferior. Because we do not want to get low marks, we are willing to look for sample essays. And if that sample is inherently very good and recognized by everyone, why would we not use it to get high marks?

But writing is not that difficult. The misconception that writing is an art form and that writers need to be creative probably comes from an old curriculum that focused too much on artistic writing. The most important element of writing is something that everyone has: their own thinking.

It is the likes, dislikes, thoughts about life, experiences of each person. It is the humanity in each of us. A very unique humanity of each individual, something that no one else can replace, let alone a machine.

The Vietnamese themselves have a saying, “Nine people have ten opinions.” Even if two people think the same thing overall, there are still differences in detail. And when we look at more specific situations, we will see very clear differences.

It is the nature of human nature that no two people are exactly alike. Therefore, “what we want to say” cannot be a copy of someone else’s. Therefore, copying someone else’s exact words is an act of exchanging one’s own personality, applying it to someone else’s identity.

Writing, or more accurately, expressing one's thoughts, is an act of generating original ideas from one's own thinking experiences. Writing in its true sense has never been, and should never be, an act of copying or repeating what others have said or done.

The Nature of AI Writing

The AI ​​that is being used to assist with writing today is essentially a large language model (LLM) that predicts language. It does not “think” in the same way that humans do. From a large number of data points, it “generates” the content of the answers by predicting the correct sequence of words. The AI ​​itself has no original ideas. What it says, is what someone else has said.

If AI gives us new knowledge, it is because we did not know it before, not because it was created by AI. If we see AI writing the same thoughts as we think, it is just a phenomenon of confirming our thoughts, not a discussion with an expert to gain a deeper understanding of that field. AI is a tool to support searching and synthesizing, not a factory to produce output content.

But now, we are entering a world that only cares about results, which are numbers. With that mindset of using a ready-made surefire model, why not use it? So it is said that AI is just a symptom of a long-standing disease. It is not a new phenomenon, but just an aggravation of the old disease.

We gave it the name "created" just to pat ourselves on the back and console ourselves that: copying from an AI that creates is better than copying a description of a dog or cat from a model essay book.

Or to put it another way: when it comes to artificial intelligence, that person is no different from a primary school child tearfully looking for a textbook.

We write because we want to express something in our hearts. Every word written to the reader should be the author’s own words. If you can’t write yet, or “don’t know what to write,” cultivate yourself well, and that understanding will naturally come from within your heart.

Source: https://baoquangnam.vn/viet-bang-tri-tue-nhan-tao-he-qua-cua-nhan-tinh-thut-lui-3155010.html