Automattic, the parent of WordPress, launched a new AI blog writing tool. But this one doesn’t worry me the way some others do.
As you may have figured out by now, I don’t necessarily love artificial intelligence. That’s especially true when it comes to having AI actually write blog posts. So you might assume you know exactly how I feel about a new AI blog writing tool Automattic just launched.
But hang on there a second. You might be wrong.
AI didn’t leave a good first impression
Last year, I decided to give the AI platform ChatGPT a whirl. I asked it to produce a blog post for me about common grammar mistakes. It immediately produced a listicle of 10 common issues. I didn’t suggest a listicle, but I was impressed that it came up with that. Listicles can be popular ways to present topics.
But right off the bat, I realized there was a serious problem. The very first item it listed was subject-verb agreement. That’s definitely a problem I see when I copyedit in my real job.
But then I looked at what it had to say about that issue. It gave an example of the problem. Then it gave a “solution.” But it illustrated how to make the subject and verb disagree, not agree.
Needless to say, I was far from impressed. Maybe, if the seventh or eighth thing had an error, I might have been a bit more forgiving. But when the first “tip” is wrong, I was ready to toss the whole thing.
I didn’t publish it anyway, nor would I have. But I know there are bloggers who use AI to compose blog posts. In some cases, they literally let AI do all the work. They just have it generate content which they copy and paste. That, to me, is not blogging.
Even worse, some of the bloggers who let a computer compose their content don’t even disclose it. That’s their right, I suppose. But it’s not remotely ethical. The audience depends on a blogger to be authentic. When the words the reader sees didn’t even come from the blogger, what’s the point?
But not all AI writing tools are the same
TechCrunch says this new tool, which Automattic calls Write Brief with AI, has a different goal. Instead of it writing everything, it wants to help you be more succinct in what you write. Automattic’s page about Write Brief with AI lists these features the program employs:
- Complex words – The tool highlights complex words and suggests simpler alternatives to enhance clarity.
- Long sentence – The tool identifies overly long sentences, suggesting how to split them for better readability.
- Unconfident words – The tool highlights words that weaken your statements and suggests stronger alternatives.
I can definitely get behind that kind of AI assistance. It’s not doing the heavy lifting; it’s merely doing a bit of dusting after the fact.
I use Grammarly as a spell-check tool. It also has some advanced grammar features. It often suggests ways to shorten sentences just as it suggests spelling corrections. It also likes to suggest that I add Oxford commas at every opportunity and I reject those suggestions almost every time. But that’s another story.
I wouldn’t object to using a tool like that at all. Making writing more concise is not a bad thing, particularly if that means making it easier to read and understand. (And in most cases, that’s just the result you get.)
As long as you’re writing the content and letting an AI blog writing tool offer suggestions, that’s fine in my book. And I wouldn’t suggest anyone disclose that any more than they’d need to disclose using a spell-check.
Anything that makes the writing better — without doing the writing for you — would be a welcome addition.
