Red Writing Hood, Her Poor Grammar And The Would Cutter

Sometimes things are so stupid I can't even, but you might want to know this because it's the world we're writing in. Apparently. Ugh.

Y’all, hoo boy do I have a story for you. Dead stupid. Dead true.

But first—Wednesday was my birthday so I was going to turn on payments and offer a birthday discount but it was above freezing and the sun was shining so I went out and bought books with my birthday coupon and then walked in the woods instead.

So. I’m turning on payments in March and I’ll be offering a stupidly generous discount to anyone who’s pledged in advance. If you’re interested, click the subscribe button at the bottom and select pledge a subscription. I’ll email in advance to tell you the day and the discount so you won’t just get your card hit without warning. :)

On to the story.

I’ve been pretty vocal about saying I don’t think using AI to generate writing is the same as a human being telling a story. I honest to goodness didn’t think there was any way anyone could argue that. Having a robot spit out words might be a story, but it isn’t a human being telling a story. Or so I thought.

Apparently, I was wrong.

When I am wrong, I am not afraid to say I’m wrong.

What I didn’t count on was people’s propensity to use software without having any clue how it works. Apparently. And I don’t mean ChatGPT. I mean grammarly.

I don’t normally share private conversations but this one I think I need to. No names, no details. Anyone uses any names or details, I’ll delete the comment. People have slammed me publicly when they don’t agree even if they’re wrong because I do my homework (lol) and it doesn’t feel nice to be publicly pointed at. And this isn’t about who done-it or where or why. It’s about the world we’re writing in.

I posted a comment in a writers’ Slack group about people using AI to churn out posts and how demotivating that is to real writers. I take hours to write a post, some other person vomits out a ChatGPT post in minutes flat. I can’t keep up with that.

On Substack it’s less of an issue because AI writers aren’t taking money out of my pocket. On Medium, they are. You bet they are. Every day. Swaths of it.

So anyway, I said look, I get that people use AI to help with editing, grammar and such. Maybe they get a 10% AI score if you run it through AI detection. But when I see posts that test out at 65% to 95% AI, that’s not a human being writing a post.

Another writer told me I’m wrong. She said she writes her posts same way I do. Puts in the sweat and time to write something. Then she runs it through grammarly to check spelling and grammar and such. And then it gets a 90% AI score. Wtf?

Just wait. Because truth really is stranger than fiction. Some things you can’t make up.

Turns out Grammarly has settings. Oh my god, go figure!!!

Who knew software would have user settings, wtf?

Sorry, that’s sarcasm.

Apparently if you use Grammarly, you need to turn off the settings that tell it to rewrite your words. Because if you let Grammarly rewrite, it will. And that’s AI.

There are levels of shake my head here.

First. Why would that be turned on by default?

Second. How do you not notice that the words on the page are different than the words you typed? I cannot imagine a world in which I would not notice my words being changed by some piece of software. How oblivious do you have to be?

Those were the first things I wondered.

Then I thought about it a while, so let me answer in case you’re wondering the same.

First, I think *if* rewriting is turned on by default—and I don’t know that it is because I’ve never used grammarly—but "*if* rewriting is turned on by default, it’s probably because Grammarly knows that people who use it struggle with writing.

Make their words all pretty, they’ll keep using it.

Somehow I just can’t see Stephen King or Margaret Atwood using Grammarly if you get what I’m saying here. A man with two good legs doesn’t need a crutch. Sorry.

Look. I get that there are “reasons” people use grammarly. But if you’re letting it rewrite your content, you need to realize those are not your words. They’re not. Might be your ideas, might be your thoughts. But it isn’t your words.

Second. I don’t think people *don’t notice* their words are being changed.

I think they do notice and think “omg, that sounds so much better” and don’t realize those rewrites are going to get their writing tagged as AI until some curmudgeon like me points it out. Or declines it for my pub. Thanks, I don’t publish AI. Sorry.

And then they get all up in their feelings. But, but, but, it’s my ideas.

Might be so, but they aren’t your words. Ideas are not copyrightable. Ideas are not intellectual property. Words are. The way you say it is. So if you want to claim that’s your work, I’m sorry but you’re going to have to learn to write. Simple as that.

Who knew the would-cutter was the villain in the story.

I don’t know what to do about that. I don’t.

All I know is when I find people who can write their butt off and score 0% AI, I will do everything I can to shout their work from the rooftops.

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Next. Because AI isn’t nearly done with us. I was reading an interview with someone who works at Substack and he said a lot of people come to Substack and they’re new and they think they aren’t getting any visibility and they think all the traffic is going to the big established writers but that’s not entirely true, it’s just that Substack functions more like small communities and less like a giant city and the algorithm just doesn’t know which community you belong in yet.

You know that algorithms are AI too, right?

I point that out only to show that AI affects all of us, not just people using it. And yes, I’m going to write about that because I think I see a way around the AI bubble. I’m going to do some testing next week and then I’ll write about what happened.

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Last one. I read a post this morning on Substack that said writing is thinking. The point was that we shouldn’t be afraid of AI because it can’t think, only people can.

I don’t agree. Writing isn’t thinking because if it was, AI wouldn’t be able to emulate humans and fool us almost every time. And it does. Statistics show that most people think they can spot AI but when it’s in front of them, they honest to goodness can’t tell and more often than not, they think AI writing is actually human writing.

I don’t know how to define what writing is in a world of AI. I don’t.

All I know is some people write because it earns them money and if it stopped paying they’d stop writing and some of those people use AI to do the writing for them because they can get away with it.

And I know other people write because they can’t not write.

It’s how they’re made.

Here’s one other thing I know. On a piece by piece basis, AI might be able to fool people. But over an entire body of work, I don’t think it can.

Because people have personalities.

Read the same person long enough, you get a feel for who they are.

That doesn’t happen with AI. With Ai, the voice isn’t consistent. Because AI reaches into its fat belly and composes articles, stories and poems based on the collective works it stole from the internet. It can do that in seconds flat. But no personality ever emerges. Because AI doesn’t have a personality. There’s no shortcut to personality.

Oscar Wilde said “be you, everyone else is taken.” And they are. Literally. By AI. Stole most of the words off the internet to fill it’s fat belly and spits them out in a nonstop tsunami of words. But only you have your personality. It’s all you got. Lean into it.

Love to know what you think.

"Be yourself, everyone else is taken"
—Oscar Wilde