My friend Jon Whittle wrote a thoughtful piece on whether AI should be used in writing. I have some thoughts and clarifications.
At Proudly Human, we are not anti-AI. We are pro-human. We think AI has enormous benefits for society. Like all things, we will need to work out where and how those benefits occur and where we need to avoid its use to prevent harm.
At Proudly Human we aren’t saying that people who want to listen to AI-generated music or read AI-generated text are wrong. We are saying people should have information to make an informed choice. Since it is impossible that all AI-generated or AI-assisted content will be labelled accordingly, we are flipping it and verifying and labelling human-created content.
This is so people know and can make an informed choice. We believe it is a basic right of all humans to know when they are interacting with other humans, or AI masquerading as human. The issue is disclosure.
Let me say it another way. I believe in people’s freedom to do what they want, as long as it doesn’t harm others. Deception is harm.
The above clarification should resolve the perceived irony that Proudly Human uses technology, and AI, where it can, to help determine whether something is human-created or AI-generated. Generative AI is a technological tool that should be appropriately used.
Proudly Human is the recognizable global trust-mark in all industries identifying when something is human-created. So people know. So they can choose.
Personally, I don’t want to read a birthday or anniversary wish or listen to a speech from a loved one at a wedding if AI had a hand in generating the text. It’s too personal. I want other humans to communicate to me in their uniquely flawed human way from the heart and to the best of their abilities.
The Proudly Human de minimis use of AI in writing allows for brainstorming ideas and fact checking. We think of it as a way to assist with thinking just like any person who is constructing their ideas and working through how to express them might have a conversation with another human to get advice. AI can also be used to conduct menial tasks such as spellchecking, grammar checking, formatting tables of contents and formatting bibliographies.
The Proudly Human de minimis use of AI was inspired by the US Copyright Office which will only register copyright for original works created by a human.
Jon writes in his piece about how AI use could be analogous to cooking.
“The purist would say that you should never buy ready-made food, and always cook from scratch yourself. Others like the convenience of store-bought meals (although there’s a serious risk you’ll end up with slop this way). In the middle is the cook who follows a recipe to create a beautiful home-made creation that still captures the essence of the cook but doesn’t require them to attend culinary school.”
The cooking analogy is good, and I agree. I’ll use it to make my point. Sometimes I might want a quick prepackaged meal and other times the moment calls for a beautiful homemade creation.
Let’s say I went to someone’s house for dinner because they said they were going to cook me a nice homemade meal from scratch. Not packaged food, because they know I am health conscious and am careful in what I eat. If after dinner they told me it was store bought and all they did was pop it out of the plastic packaging and reheat it in the oven for 45 minutes, I would feel deceived and upset. Most of us would. That is what is happening with so many people’s use of AI, when they don’t disclose it.
Proudly Human isn’t taking a stance that AI-generated content is good or bad. What we are trying to help with is disclosure and a recognizable trust mark for people to find human-created content when that is what they are seeking.
We aren’t saying whether human-created content is good or bad, just that a human made it.
Having lived through the introduction of the Internet and all its innovations and developments for the past 30-years, I know first-hand new technologies come with benefits and harms. Pretty much everything in life is a trade-off. AI is no different. Proudly Human is providing the transparency trust-mark when someone is looking for certainty that a creative work is human-created.
And yes, I wrote this entirely by myself with no assistance of any kind from AI. Microsoft Word’s built-in spell checker underlined my mistyped words in red. I suspect there are grammatical issues.
I used only my own mind; my talents and skills that I have developed, or not, over the years. Is it good? Is it well written? I don’t know. But it is me. It is my voice. It is my style. It is a reflection of how I think. For me that is what is most important to preserve: humanness.
Those with better education, those who know more about the English language and literary rules, I am sure they will find fault. But that is ok, I am not them. I am uniquely human.
A gift for Jon. He can add the ProudlyHuman™ certification mark to his piece. Not only did he acknowledge that he wrote it, I verified it with our suite of detection tools. It scored as purely human. Yes, our suite of detection tools is very accurate. :)