Can AI Really Write Good Stuff For You? Understanding the Hype.

[hankypankee]

From my experience, the answer is yes, it can create good stuff, but with an important caveat: it cannot really be done effortlessly.

 

AI can produce good writing, but only if you give it detailed context and direction. It needs a story, a framework, or a clear narrative to work from. Even then, you usually have to put in a fair amount of editing and massaging of what it creates to make the final output feel original and authentic, and to get it to where you really want it.

 

Good AI writing may end up really only being 50 to 60 percent AI, mainly as the foundation of the text, with the rest shaped by human input and manual tweaking. It is the final human touches that often make it truly good writing. If you go beyond that threshold, the final results will often suffer. So one has to be able to write well enough to begin with, or the necessary combination of AI writing and human participation cannot fully be reached.

 

Sometimes it even takes a few rounds of back and forth before the AI really starts to understand the tone, style, and meaning the writer is aiming for. In fact, one of the best ways to use it is to first draft something yourself and then use AI to refine, edit, polish, tighten, and improve word flow and meaning.

 

The idea that you can just throw in a quick one or two sentence prompt and instantly get something really good out of it in two minutes is both myth and misnomer. AI is a tool, and like any tool, it works best when guided by quality human input and creativity. Without that, the results are usually mediocre at best. As the old saying goes in the world of creative media, “Garbage in, garbage out.”

 

So if you want good results, you have to be willing to put in the effort. Much of the AI writing you see online that is actually worth reading almost certainly had a strong dose of human direction and editing behind it, or it is probably not even worth reading.

 

AI writing should really only be seen as a draft or starting point and not be viewed as a one-stop-shop that provides the final product.

[emptypockets]

LL2.0 is a case in point. Complete drivel.

[Nemises]

9 hours ago, hankypankee said:

AI can produce good writing

Yes it can. What version of ChatGPT did you use?

[KannikaP]

I have found ChatGPT , normal free version to be good.

A bit worried with Co-Pilot who remembers every little detail I have talked about in the last four months, and includes some of them in most conversations.

Perplexity is OO. Gemini will not involve itself in any cannabis discussions.

Not tried Brave's LEO yet.

[simon43]

I create short stories with pictures for children in Myanmar, to help them to learn to read English.

 

I use an app called Scrively which creates the story and images, based on my initial input.  As with other AI apps, one needs to edit and tweak the created output, in order to ensure the correct style and (in my case), using words and phrases that are matched to the language abilities of these young students.

 

When I'm happy with the little story book, I get a native Burmese person to translate it (my Burmese language skills are at the basic level at the moment!).  Then I edit the produced pdfs to add the Burmese text as well, finally producing a bilingual book with a non-contentious but relevant storyline, such as 'The Old Fisherman at Inle Lake' and so on.  Traditional stories, those with a moral etc.  Finally, the audio of the story is linked into my IOS/Android app so that the student can listen to the words/story spoken by a highly-educated British man with a clear (RP) accent (that's me lol!!).

 

 

[mikebell]

4 minutes ago, simon43 said:

I get a native Burmese person to translate it

I get ChatGPT to translate my writing into Thai. 

[simon43]

13 minutes ago, mikebell said:

I get ChatGPT to translate my writing into Thai. 

Absolutely not good enough!  I can read/write Thai (MA from Chula), and I therefore know that the Thai text that most/all AI apps create has grammatical errors.  I can read Burmese and I know that ChatGPT or Google Translate etc doesn't produce perfect text in Burmese.  So I pay a small amount for a native speaker to do my translations.

[Gottfrid]

18 minutes ago, simon43 said:

Absolutely not good enough!  I can read/write Thai (MA from Chula), and I therefore know that the Thai text that most/all AI apps create has grammatical errors.  I can read Burmese and I know that ChatGPT or Google Translate etc doesn't produce perfect text in Burmese.  So I pay a small amount for a native speaker to do my translations.

100% correct!  I work with AI every day and have made a lot of agents for each topic that needs to be addressed. There is not only grammar that gets strange, but also the total localizationwhich includes custom, culture and specific ways of using different expressions.

In my case, one agent does the work to find correct subject and making the search word research, which includes primary, secondary, long tails, LSI and semantically connected words and phrases. After that, the second take over and create outlines for different long articles, sub-pages and landing pages. Finally the third moves in and create the whole text programmed and thought to localize and write correct grammar.

There are also other agents involved that are comparing different suggestions for articles, subjects and outlines, and clean up as well as throw away the suggestions that are not up to par. Even as I have that automation in motion, I still need 3 native content editors, to get up my 300-400 articles and sub-pages each month. However, it does do a lot of the work, and things are moving along much quicker than before, but AI needs to be checked and controlled.

[emptypockets]

Heard a story yesterday about a lady who worked for bank in Aust. She's 63 years old and had worked for the bank for 25 years.

She spent quite a while training the responses of a chatbot to do her job.

She completed that and was subsequently made redundant.

 

I think we will see a lot more of redundancies by AI in the near future.

 

Great for the bosses, no so great for the workers.

 

https://au.finance.yahoo.com/news/commonwealth-bank-workers-brutal-realisation-after-training-ai-chatbot-that-made-her-redundant-042726816.html?guccounter=1&guce_referrer=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cuZ29vZ2xlLmNvbS5hdS8&guce_referrer_sig=AQAAAMjNAYUM82FMwCpjoWH4Q59yFkOclx6Sy1LAnv48voYMvv4RMFX8hgtvNosScXHsBf89ddvWvdDNSEewRV81fZFcVXF0dTVXo8S0BIXRG5Eef_2ZhwETw2Re1FGndlAB4A1WjCMpoNCuj7VRaJJRaeB3ZmhZWJYtJFtTumushKrd

[connda]

5 hours ago, Nemises said:

Yes it can. What version of ChatGPT did you use?

Exactly.

[ColeBOzbourne]

I know very little about AI or ChatGPT. Can language learners select a language to have a 'chat' and practice conversation skills at different difficulty levels? 

[EVENKEEL]

This will be a great tool for DOD employees who must submit KSA's for advancement. 

[Will B Good]

 

 

Apparently A1 can write some cracking birthday cards.....and even forge your signature (from 23 years ago).

 

Amazing.

[Freddy42OZ]

23 hours ago, hankypankee said:

From my experience, the answer is yes, it can create good stuff, but with an important caveat: it cannot really be done effortlessly.

 

AI can produce good writing, but only if you give it detailed context and direction. It needs a story, a framework, or a clear narrative to work from. Even then, you usually have to put in a fair amount of editing and massaging of what it creates to make the final output feel original and authentic, and to get it to where you really want it.

 

Good AI writing may end up really only being 50 to 60 percent AI, mainly as the foundation of the text, with the rest shaped by human input and manual tweaking. It is the final human touches that often make it truly good writing. If you go beyond that threshold, the final results will often suffer. So one has to be able to write well enough to begin with, or the necessary combination of AI writing and human participation cannot fully be reached.

 

Sometimes it even takes a few rounds of back and forth before the AI really starts to understand the tone, style, and meaning the writer is aiming for. In fact, one of the best ways to use it is to first draft something yourself and then use AI to refine, edit, polish, tighten, and improve word flow and meaning.

 

The idea that you can just throw in a quick one or two sentence prompt and instantly get something really good out of it in two minutes is both myth and misnomer. AI is a tool, and like any tool, it works best when guided by quality human input and creativity. Without that, the results are usually mediocre at best. As the old saying goes in the world of creative media, “Garbage in, garbage out.”

 

So if you want good results, you have to be willing to put in the effort. Much of the AI writing you see online that is actually worth reading almost certainly had a strong dose of human direction and editing behind it, or it is probably not even worth reading.

 

AI writing should really only be seen as a draft or starting point and not be viewed as a one-stop-shop that provides the final product.

Totally depends what you want it to write, how you write your prompts and whether you'd defined how you want it to work. 

Big difference between writing titles and/or descriptions for your YouTube channel, versus writing a lengthy document.