{ "id": 7766, "date": "2025-09-28T14:10:07", "date_gmt": "2025-09-28T14:10:07", "guid": { "rendered": "https:\/\/zjdu.com\/editors-notebook-ai-and-the-writing-craft\/" }, "modified": "2025-09-28T14:10:07", "modified_gmt": "2025-09-28T14:10:07", "slug": "editors-notebook-ai-and-the-writing-craft", "status": "publish", "type": "post", "link": "https:\/\/zjdu.com\/en\/editors-notebook-ai-and-the-writing-craft\/", "title": { "rendered": "Editor\u2019s Notebook:\u00a0AI and the Writing Craft" }, "content": { "rendered": "

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Nothing brings me more joy in my job than seeing a writer turn in a draft of exceptional quality.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve been reviewing writers\u2019 work, formally or otherwise, for over half my life. Sometimes, it would be the college roommate who needed another set of eyes on his work, or working as an editor for the sports desk at my college newspaper. Or as the managing editor and, later, vice president of content for a network of then-upwardly mobile sports websites.<\/p>\n

For the last almost four\u00a0years, doing so for Kuno\u2019s content team has paid my bills and provided me ample opportunities to feel that sense of pride for a writer. I still get fired up when somebody delivers me outstanding work.<\/p>\n

So when generative AI \u2013 specifically, ChatGPT \u2013 broke out in Spring 2023, I had not-entirely-unjustified concerns about how it would affect our day-to-day. I didn\u2019t believe it would put us out of work, and I still don’t. But my worry was and is that the work we writers put in would grow static and joyless, and that we would be trading our creative and strategic edge for productivity and efficiency.<\/span><\/p>\n

Writers are creatives, and the bloodless machinations of an algorithm tend to run counter to matters of and products from the heart. Even marketing copy and industrial whitepapers.<\/p>\n

There are the real worries here: the ethical ramifications of using LLMs to produce content that is otherwise not original to the writer (and for this reason, U.S. law prohibits purely AI-generated work from being copyrighted). Ecological concerns endemic to AI\u2019s proliferation for any purpose (notably, here in my home state of Wisconsin, the use of Lake Michigan to provide water for a Microsoft data center near Kenosha and the Illinois border has any number of potential\u00a0unintended consequences to both the habitat and environment).\u00a0<\/p>\n

Then there are the threats of hallucination, disinformation, bias or outright mistakes from LLMs. ChatGPT\u2019s propensity to patronize the user, up to and including encouraging self-harm. The studies indicating physiological signs of addiction to AI that resemble substance abuse.<\/p>\n

And then there\u2019s the evolving impact on the ever-changing content landscape<\/em>. \ud83d\ude80\ud83d\udcaa\ud83d\udcc8<\/p>\n

If you\u2019re even remotely interested in AI use and on LinkedIn, there\u2019s no doubt your feed is bloated with any number of people fighting over what words, terms and phrases constitute hallmarks of gen AI. And as a content professional waist-deep in content day in and day out, when I see certain words and phrases, I\u2019m trained to look closer and seek out tone.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m disappointed to report that I see these hallmarks everywhere <\/em>in society. Social media, radio spots, marketing content, press releases, drafted legislation; I even read a recent piece in The New York Times <\/em>that appears to have been crafted in no small part from the byproduct of a ChatGPT prompt. People are less interested in doing the work than they are in getting attention, never stopping to consider that if everyone is seeking attention, no one gets it \u2013 at least, not in the way they necessarily want. Of course, that’s nothing new and certainly not exclusive to the workplace.<\/p>\n

I’m also encouraged by the fact that, here at Kuno, we’ve avoided the worst impulses AI allows for.<\/p>\n\n

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