Cloud Hosting

The siren call of AI says, It doesnt have to be this way. And when you consider the billions of people who sit outside the elite club of writer-sufferers, you start to think: Maybe it shouldnt be this way.

May Habib spent her early childhood in Lebanon before moving to Canada, where she learned English as a second language. I thought it was pretty unfair that so much benefit would accrue to someone really good at reading and writing, she says. In 2020, she founded Writer, one of several hybrid platforms that aims not to replace human writing, but to help peopleand, more accurately, brandscollaborate better with AI.

Habib says she believes theres value in the blank page stare-down. It helps you consider and discard ideas and forces you to organize your thoughts. There are so many benefits to going through the meandering, head-busting, wanna-kill-yourself staring at your cursor, she says. But that has to be weighed against the speed of milliseconds.

The purpose of Writer isnt to write for you, she says, but rather to make your writing faster, stronger, and more consistent. That could mean suggesting edits to prose and structure, or highlighting what else has been written on the subject and offering counterarguments. The goal, she says, is to help users focus less on sentence-level mechanics and more on the ideas theyre trying to communicate. Ideally, this process yields a piece of text thats just as human as if the person had written it entirely themselves. If the detector can flag it as AI writing, then youve used the tools wrong, she says.

The black-and-white notion that writing is either human- or AI-generated is already slipping away, says Ethan Mollick, a professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. Instead, were entering an era of what he calls centaur writing. Sure, asking ChatGPT to spit out an essay about the history of the Mongol Empire produces predictably AI-ish results, he says. But start writing, The details in paragraph three arent quite rightadd this information, and make the tone more like The New Yorker, he says. Then it becomes more of a hybrid work and much better-quality writing.

Mollick, who teaches entrepreneurship at Wharton, not only allows his students to use AI toolshe requires it. Now my syllabus says you have to do at least one impossible thing, he says. If a student cant code, maybe they write a working program. If theyve never done design work, they might put together a visual prototype. Every paper you turn in has to be critiqued by at least four famous entrepreneurs you simulate, he says.

Students still have to master their subject area to get good results, according to Mollick. The goal is to get them thinking critically and creatively: Idont care what tool theyre using to do it, as long as theyre using the tools in a sophisticated manner and using their mind.

Mollick acknowledges that ChatGPT isnt as good as the best human writers. But it can give everyone else a leg up. If you were a bottom-quartile writer, youre in the 60th to 70th percentile now, he says. It also frees certain types of thinkers from the tyranny of the writing process. We equate writing ability with intelligence, but thats not always true, he says. In fact, Id say its often not true.

Continued here:

The AI Detection Arms Race Is Onand College Students Are ... - WIRED