Love and Hate: The Pros and Cons of AI in Professional Writing

In a way, it really is surprising how prominent AI has become in today’s world. Everyone around us seems to have used it or learned about it in all walks of life. In comparison to other fads, movements, or even other technologies, EVERYONE we know has at least heard about it. It is kind of like the smartphone of our generation, a technology so powerful it ends up in the hands of everyone. But what are the drawbacks to the benefits of this technology? Do the benefits outweigh the cost? I won’t go over such a broad subject, but I will explain it in the field of professional writing.

Let’s start with the pros. 1. AI makes it easier to write large amounts of writing much quicker, whether by making the AI write out everything for you or for it to explain through example what you can write. 2. A second benefit is the fact that AI can make your writing more concise by inserting your written work into and asking it to make it more concise. 3. AI can also help with formatting your written work. By asking an AI to give an example of the type of work you are doing, it can respond with pretty much any type of writing format, even in other types of documents. 4. AI can also help with research so you can ask it to look for articles related to a subject and even for proof to back a claim. 5. One last benefit I’ll list is the fact that AI can also help you come up with ideas much quicker than normal. We’ll often find times when writing where we need to come up with a bunch of related items to a topic, so we can ask AI to list ideas we haven’t thought of.

Now for the cons. 1. The main ethical issue with AI is that using it to write can and usually is dishonest. When we are reading an article online, finding out that it was all written by AI makes us distrust the article as we know usually no creative human thought has been put into it. We also feel disrespected as our time was wasted on an article that the writer cut corners on, which of course leads us to distrust the writer and even the website the article is published on. 2. Sloppy, poor, and just plain wrong work may come out with AI. AI is not perfect, much like a human, but it can often be stubborn and unable to see why something it produced was wrong or untrue, which makes working with it a hassle sometimes. 3. This leads to my next point of AI taking a long time to work with depending on the work. AI can either make work go much faster and help with quality, or it can take longer to produce a high quality result, all depending on the type of work being done. Asking an AI to produce something that it can’t comprehend because it hasn’t been given proper information will often give unsatisfactory results. (See this video of Alex O’Connor on the subject: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=160F8F8mXlo.) 4. This also leads me to my next point of AI often being plagiaristic. AI, more specifically LLMs, are “taught” by having it be fed information from across the Internet. Everything from images to writing to videos, it learns only through things that have been made and “fed” into it. This naturally leads to it taking from other people’s work, which is plagiarism. 5. The last point also relates to how AI learns, and that is that AI can’t be creative the way a human can. AI thinks in numbers and it connects information it has been instructed is relevant. Because of this, it can’t often “invent” new things or come up with things that no other person has thought of before.

In conclusion, AI can provide many benefits to professional writing, but there are pitfalls that we often fall into if we don’t mindfully use AI. The single best way to circumvent all of the cons I listed is to write properly and critically think as we write when using AI, using AI as a tool instead of crutch. By using AI as just another tool, we can hopefully avoid most if not all the negatives of AI. And of course, even with the results AI gives us, we must evaluate if what it gave us is correct or not, or if it is true or false, stolen or “original”. I’ll leave you with this, don’t let AI do the thinking for you, stay mindful.