Introduction
Artificial Intelligence (AI) writers have transformed various fields, from administrative writing to technical writing, and even creative writing. AI writing involves using AI tools, like large language models (LLMs), to generate streams of written content (Alhussain and Azmi 2021). Using relevant literature, this essay discusses the benefits and risks of this technology.
Benefits
AI writers can automate routine tasks such as report generation and email responses, reducing the time required for these processes (Sætra, 2023). This efficiency allows stakeholders to focus on more strategic tasks further leading to a boost of productivity within organisations. Additionally, collaboration between human writers and AI enhances creative writing while helping to address issues such as grammatical errors and language barriers for non-native speakers (Fang et al., 2023). AI writers can help authors generate ideas, draft content, and even make revisions.
Risks
The advent of AI writers raises a number of ethical questions and risks. For example, since LLMs are trained on large datasets including copyrighted materials, do their outputs infringe on original copyrights? Is it fair to use or profit off AI generated content knowing it could be a derivative of existing intellectual property? Additionally, AI writers can very easily draft biassed, hateful, bigoted, and misleading content when given inappropriate prompts (Hutson, 2021).
Conclusion
AI writers bring some great benefits, like boosting productivity, but they also come with some complex ethical and legal issues we need to think about. The risk of copyright problems and the potential for creating harmful content emphasises the need to use this technology responsibly. AI companies must also implement ethical frameworks to help check bias in training. It is vital to find a balance between taking advantage of what it offers and being aware of the downsides.
References
Alhussain, A. I. and Azmi, A. M. (2021) ‘Automatic Story Generation: A Survey of Approaches’, ACM Comput. Surv. New York, NY, USA: Association for Computing Machinery, 54(5). doi: 10.1145/3453156.
Fang, X. et al. (2023) ‘A systematic review of artificial intelligence technologies used for story writing’, Education and information technologies, 28(11), pp. 14361–14397.
Hutson, M. (2021) ‘Robo-writers: the Rise and Risks of language-generating AI’, Nature, 591(7848), pp. 22–25. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-021-00530-0.
Sætra, H. S. (2023) ‘Generative AI: Here to stay, but for good?’, Technology in society, 75, p. 102372.