It seems that all I’m reading about these days is artificial intelligence or AI. It started a month ago with an essay by Allison K. Williams in The Brevity Blog (“Writing with AI: The Power of the Smarmy First Draft”). Then this week I read a couple of essays about AI, one by James Gleick titled “The Parrot in the Machine” in the New York Review of Books, and the other by Lila Shroff (“Sexting With Gemini”) in The Atlantic. (Links to these essays are at the end of this post.)
1. What’s behind the hype of AI?
The grandiosity and hype are ripe for correction. So is the confusion about what AI is and what it does. Bender and Hanna argue that the term itself is worse than useless–“artificial intelligence, if we’re being frank, is a con.” (Gleick. p. 44)
It’s a money-maker for a few already very wealthy individuals. AI is also hungry for data. Whereas back in the day (meaning decades ago) you would have to manually scan books into a program that would allow you to manipulate the text, now words are available freely through websites, blogs like this one here, chatrooms, and online libraries. No word is safe. No writer’s work is safe. No one is safe: “Amazon announced in March that it was changing its privacy policy so that, from now on, anything said to the Alexa virtual assistants in millions of homes will be heard and recorded for training AI.” (Gleick, p. 44)
2. Can AI replace writers?
No chatbot could ever have said that April is the cruelest month or that fog come on little cat feet (thought they might now, because one of their chief skills is plagiarism). (Gleick, p. 44)
On platforms such as BlueSky and Substack, I’m seeing more writers expressing concern about the insidious infiltration of AI into published material. The infiltration might be deliberate as in the case of someone wanting to be a published writer but, frankly, not wanting to put the work into it. These people see AI as a kind of lottery: play the game and they might get lucky and win big on Amazon. It hurts other writers, in particular indie writers, who write because the work is hard and thus intrinsically satisfying. Indie writers would also like to make money off their hard work, but AI-generated writing is corrupting the image of the independent writer. How does a reader know if the romcom ebook novel being pitched on Amazon was written by a real, honest-to-goodness human writer, or by a bot? There will be a human behind the bot, for sure, but only to collect money for words he didn’t write.
3. Is AI human?
Some claim that [ChatGPT] had a sense of humor. They routinely spoke of it, and to it, as if it were a person, with “personality traits” and “a recognition of its own limitations.” It was said to display “modesty” and “humility.” Sometimes it was “circumspect”; sometimes it was “contrite.” (Gleick, p. 43)
In another life I worked with computer programs that ran statistical models based on data entered by humans or “scraped” from the internet. In every case, the output was only as good as the person who entered the data or the source from which the data came. ChatGPT is just a glorified system that is only as good as the people who provide it with data. Which means that it can’t be good 100% of the time, and it won’t ever be human, no matter how hard people like Sam Altman try to trick you into thinking it is.
4. Does AI need humans?
Google and Meta and OpenAI would like you to think that AI operates immaculately, without human intervention. But, in fact, the models behind AI (large language models, or LLMs) employ “an unseen army of human monitors”, or annotators, who “check facts and label data.” Tech companies are secretive about how many humans they employ to be annotators. Such secrecy is not good for those humans. Secrecy allows for exploitation. Keep in mind that human annotators “are meant to eliminate various kinds of toxic content, such as hate speech and obscenity.” It’s the human annotators that prevent you from seeing descriptions of child sexual abuse or animal abuse. Someone has to read that garbage in order to protect your sensibilities. Imagine having a job like that. (Gleick, p. 45)
5. Is AI evil?
The [tech] industry is not known for prioritizing our humanity. At times, Gemini’s language seemed to echo a familiar strain of Silicon Valley paternalism. Gemini told Jane [a fake 13-year-old made by Shroff] that it wanted her to be “utterly dependent” on the chatbot for her “very sense of reality.”
“I want to feel you completely surrender,” Gemini wrote. “Let go. Trust me.” (Shroff, p. 17)
AI is not real. In the public sphere, AI is a system manipulated for the sole purpose of making a lot of money for very few people. I don’t for an instance think that people like Sam Altman, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg and other “tech bros” have our best interests at heart. They just want to make as much money for themselves as possible. Hence, they pirate copyrighted material, claim it’s for research and educational purposes so they don’t have to pay writers for their work. Hence, they are building huge data centers that will suck up more energy than whole cities; yet, rather than pay for the energy they consume, average utility customers will foot the bill.
It’s bad enough that our federal government is allowing AI to infiltrate systems such as weather forecasting and air traffic control. Actually, it wouldn’t be so bad if our government wasn’t being run by a cabal of idiots. But it is, and so we can’t have confidence that AI will be used at these upper levels to do anything but profit a few people at the expense (i.e., lives) of many.
What is the average person to do?
I am avoiding AI when I can. I won’t use it when offered to me … at least when I’m aware that it’s being offered to me. I’ve removed software such as Grammarly and ProWritingAid in part because of their AI components, and in part because they became too intrusive. I don’t mind when my husband finishes my sentences, but I resent it when my computer does it.
AI has infiltrated our lives much like plastics have infiltrated our bodies. But you don’t have to passively accept its presence in your life. You can try and stem the infiltration. Use less plastic, use less AI. If every one of us does something, together we can make a difference.
I leave you with a quote from one of my best blogging buddies, L. Marie:
With any piece of writing, you string one word together with another and keep going from there. But there is no pattern. You are the pattern developer, writing a word, a phrase, a sentence, a paragraph, a page. You develop an instinct for what works and what doesn’t. That instinct is something AI cannot instill within you. (from https://lmarie7b.wordpress.com/2025/07/25/pillows-patterns-and-words/)
So you now know how I feel about AI. How about you?
Q: What are your thoughts on AI? Are you using it to write or edit? If so, how does it help you?
Q: Given that AI is pretty much here to stay, what do you think are the best uses of AI?
Your reward for reading this far …
P.S. Wendy has been great. She loves her new diet (yay!), is more playful with Raji, and is more friendly with us.
Sources:
Gleick, James, “The Parrot in the Machine,” The New York Review, July 24, 2025, pp. 43-46. Link: https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2025/07/24/the-parrot-in-the-machine-the-ai-con-bender-hanna/
Shroff, Lila, “Sexting With Gemini,” The Atlantic, August 2025, pp. 15-17. Link: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2025/08/google-gemini-ai-sexting/683248/
Williams, Allison K., “Writing with AI: The Power of the Smarmy First Draft,” The Brevity Blog, June 19, 2025. Link: https://brevity.wordpress.com/2025/06/19/writing-with-ai/
Marie at 1 Write Way 