FIVE DANGERS IN WRITING WITH AI

1. You lose your touch: One thing with writing and being a writer is how you consciously or unconsciously become a style after constantly engaging in the act of writing. It is easy to say “this is how Soyinka writes”, “that is Achebe’s style” and so on. I remember a senior colleague once accused me of not being able to hide my style in a speech I wrote for someone even without telling him I wrote the speech. The first danger with habitually writing with AI is that you cannot evolve as a style and if you’ve got one already you would soon lose your spark.

2. You stand aloof from your writing: Another danger that comes with writing with AI is that many get in an oil-water situation when they have to deliver AI-generated contents. A clear dissonance is immediately felt between their person and their writing. Writing is a reflection of one’s inner being. When people present AI-generated contents, their attempts to expatiate or illustrate on whatever they read immediately give them away as either less intelligent than the content of their speech or more intelligent but lazy to develop genuine content.

3. You get mentally lazy: While of course the use of AI makes thinking and writing process easier, its abuse and misuse which many count as real use gradually result in intellectual weakness. The inside-out approach to AI demands that one generates original ideas and deploy AI to make it better. If you normalise consulting AI first when you have a need to think, you will soon realise how much of a poor thinker you have become one day when you’re unable to have immediate access to AI and you have to face a real-time intellectual challenge.

4. You feel empty for lack of rigour: In this age when AI now generates abstracts, chapterisations, and even drafts contents for academic-cum-intellectual works, the mental stretch that comes with writing and research which results in intellectual fulfilment is now missing. Bringing a paper to an end used to feel like building a mansion or giving birth to a baby when AI hadn’t made research an armchair and an overnight miracle. People are now less excited, elated and fulfilled about academic works and writing because AI has made it a piece of cake.

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5. You stop philosophising or professing: As a consequence to mental laziness and lack of rigour, a scholar or writer soon becomes unable to philosophise or has nothing to profess of course having also lost their spark, style or touch as a scholar.

AI has come to stay and it is for use but are you using it, abusing it or misusing it?