AI (artificial intelligence) generated content creation is mentioned everywhere from the national news to “day in the life” videos on YouTube. Some consider it a great threat. Others believe it to be a blessing. Only time will tell who is correct. But there are many beliefs about content created by Chat GPT (Generative Pretrained Transformer) and other AI content creation programs that are already known to be false.
Myth: You can use it as an easy side hustle that earns hundreds of dollars every day.
Reality: The only people who are making easy money this way are the ones getting views and subscribers on YouTube by convincing people this is true. One supposed method for earning hundreds every day involves making the AI content generator give you ideas for names for businesses, content for web pages, and other details you can then turn around and sell to people who want to start their own business. But if anybody can just make the program generate this content with a few keywords, future entrepreneurs could simply do it themselves. They would have no reason to pay someone else.
Myth: Creating documents or even academic papers with AI is no different than taking a class and having someone teach you the material via lecture.
Reality: Creating documents presented as your own writing, especially academic papers, with AI is cheating. If you copy down the generated content and put your name on it, it is plagiarism, just as if you copied the text from a book or a page on the internet. Some students attempt to get around this by taking notes from the generated text, and rewriting the document in their own words. This is still cheating. If you are being asked to write a paper based on gathered and interpreted content, you are being asked to write a research paper. Research is one of the skills you are expected to learn and/or strengthen. If you are using AI, the bot is doing the research step of the assignment for you.
Myth: Content generated by AI is always accurate or useful
Reality:AI generated content varies in accuracy. In some cases, the software returns results that are exactly what a professional or expert in the field would report. Other times, the generated content leaves out important details. This is because all it can really do is gather information found on the internet. It cannot truly interact with you. This is especially noticeable in fields like medicine and finance. A human doctor or nurse can be led to ask targeted questions or suspect certain health issues based on details such as a patient’s tone of voice, word choice, and body language. A human banker or accountant would know how to gather information about the client’s specific situation before making suggestions about budgeting, investing, and other money-related issues. AI software is only going to spit out generic content in response to typed keywords.
Myth: Poetry, music, novels, and other literary art work created by AI is going to allow the bots to replace poets, novelists, playwrights, and screenwriters.
Reality: The software can generate a technically correct version of these things. But more often than not, it is bland, uninspired, and boring. Just as it will never be able to interact with a human being as a doctor or nurse can with their patient, even the most sophisticated AI content generator will never have the emotional reaction to the world around it necessary to create great…or even good…art. It may spit out a correctly written and formatted script for a teen movie, but it will never remember what it was like to be a teenager. The bot can generate lyrics for a love song, but it will never have been in love. It can produce a poem about the problems of homophobia or sexism or racism, but no bot has any idea what it feels like to experience discrimination.
Myth: If all you really need is a basic, bland research paper on a topic for school, and you don’t have a problem with cheating, you can get away with it if you use an AI text generator.
Reality: Even if you can brush aside the ethical issues, and you’re just in class to get a grade, not to learn anything, AI content generators are not your wish come true. Anti-plagiarism software is keeping up with AI, and may contain a detection tool. One commonly used program, “TurnItIn,” generates a report on the percentage of a paper that is determined to have been AI generated. The teacher can then click on that, and see the content highlighted. While the tool is not perfect, it errs on the side of over-reporting, not under-reporting AI use. You are just as likely, if not more likely, to get caught cheating when you use an AI content generator to do your work than by using old-fashioned cheating methods.
Many news reports on chatGPT end with a surprise announcement that the above content was actually generated by the software. This content was written by a person who worked as a reporter for more than ten years and is currently a novelist, writing teacher, and content writer. The research consisted of more than ten weeks working directly with an AI generated content screening tool as a writing teacher, a two-month survey of various YouTube videos and articles on the subject to gather general content present in more than two sources, and direct experimentation with AI content generators. Before this final paragraph was written, a free AI content generator was prompted to create a presentation on the topic of this article. It returned none of the myths listed here, just three points insisting that AI generated content was superior. A second content generator offered up a similar document, though it did briefly touch on the point that it will never replace human writers.
