AI is messing with my craft as a writer

When I press New Document, the blank page has already been annexed by AI.

I love a blank page. For all my career, it has been an invitation to expression; a portal to things that pique my curiosity; a waiting space that will mirror my thoughts if I, too, am patient. Most of the time, it looks like a playground; occasionally it’s a Munch scream.

It’s where we all start – literally and proverb­ially. Infant brains, artists poised with pencils, engineers with rulers, cops with flick pads and columnists, who lift the lid on the laptop and press New Document, readying to face the white space once again.

But it doesn’t work like that now. When I press New Document, the blank page has already been annexed by AI. It’s waiting for me, ready at my command. Do I want to “draft an email to the neighbourhood organisation” it asks. No. Do I want to “write a newsletter on successful camping during rainy seasons”? As if! Do I want to “write an email to invite parents to the school bakery sale”? Should I send it via the funeral home?

Ever since the last upgrade when the AI program was installed, I’ve faffed around on the keyboard to rid New Document of AI prompts. Eventually I succeeded, although that little cube on the left-hand side of the page remained. I’m scared to press that. Actually, I did just press that and this is what popped up …

The blank page is no longer mine alone – it has become an accomplice to something alien, a collaborator I didn’t choose, intrusive and insistent ... Yep, it knows where I’m going. It’s ready to finish the job. Nay, it wants to finish the job that it started. Every time. Every topic. Every person.

I thought that AI would be something you could summons or just ignore. I thought admin assistants, lazy managers and exasperated teachers would use it for boring jobs. Naive, probably. Too much time spent looking into a blank space.

The intrusiveness of AI (and it admits to it) is a worry. It’s there waiting for a command, it’s easy to use, it knows you already so why not? It’s building on the addiction tools of social media – always inviting, hard to resist, everyone’s on it. It’s the snack stand at the checkout.

I hope we don’t all get seduced by an easy draft. I know I won’t. Sure, I like fooling with it. Telling it what I want it to write and then gleefully critiquing its efforts. Too many words, too many phrases and it never goes blah, blah. One teacher commented that the best way to pick an AI essay from a student was to note the punctuation. If it was perfect, it was fake.

Even though it doesn’t go blah blah, it’s getting better at mimicking us. A couple of studies over the past few months have shown people can’t tell the difference between a human chatbot and a large language modelled powered one. Another study said GPT-4 outperformed humans in persuasion and empathy.

Time to stop the Word and get off. I asked the Copilot icon how to turn itself off. Here’s what it said: “I can’t directly perform document-related commands, including turning off Copilot. However, I can help you with other tasks such as summarising documents …” Sure, sure.

I guess the only answer is to fight. Fight the AI intrusions every day, every document, every time you get stuck, every time you feel lazy. Like all digital intrusions into our lives, we’re on our own but we can band together. Save the Blank Page! There’s a petition there, a rallying call and I bet Copilot would do a better job writing it than I. Blah.
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