AI-Generated Writing — Should it be Paid the Same as Human-Generated Writing?
An Ethical Question That Needs to be Answered
AI-generated content is a complex subject with many tentacles. For this article I am going to narrowly focus on the ethics (Does anyone care about those anymore or are they as obsolete as rotary phones?) of Artificial Intelligence written articles making money for the Medium (and other platforms) authors who publish them.
Is it acceptable for an article to make MORE money or ANY money for the content creator who used a robot (AI) to write it than one written by a genuinely talented human being?
For the uninitiated, this is a tiny sample of what AI apps are capable of writing. As they continue to improve, their abilities will be limitless.
EDUCATION:
Term papers — Teachers everywhere are already scrambling to try to catch the “cheaters” who use AI-generated writing tools.
Teacher’s Lesson plans- Yeah, I get the irony.
WRITING:
Blog posts
Product Reviews
Answers to product reviews
Social media comments
An article about any subject
An entire novel
BUSINESS:
Prep questions and answers for a job interview
Devise business plans
Produce content ideas for marketing
Press releases
Sales copywriting
Before I did the research for this article, I thought my premise was simple, straightforward, and indisputable. If you are a student and convince someone else to write your essays or take your tests, you are CHEATING. And guess what? There are consequences for cheating. If you are in any grade in school and get caught cheating, your work is not accepted and you are given a failing grade.
If you are in college (West Point Cheating Scandal), you are suspended or expelled.
It is my firm opinion that if you enlist a robot to write any piece of work for you, put your name on it, and the Internet platform PAYS you for the “reads” it gets, you are CHEATING. You are being paid for work you did not do. No different than getting an “A” on a school essay that a robot wrote for you.
However, based on the articles I have read while researching this topic, in the new world of technology in which we now live, using a robot to do Internet writing is not considered cheating. It’s considered “utilizing a tool”.
I’ve also seen it referred to as “leveling the playing field”. In my antiquated mind, that means rewarding those with less talent and ability for cheating. That’s probably not a popular opinion, but it’s mine and I’m sticking to it.
What it means to me is that a writer on Medium (or a similar platform) with little writing talent can plug their ideas into an AI app, ask for a blog post to be written based on those ideas, and within minutes, a well-constructed, organized, well-written post appears. The author makes a few tweaks to fine-tune their objective and publishes it on the platform.
If the author chose a “trending” topic it’s more than possible that they will garner enough “reads” to make a decent amount of money from the article.
Is it fair and ethical for you to be competing against a robot? I repeat the question I asked at the beginning of this article. Is it fair and ethical for an AI-written article to make as much or more money for its Medium “creator” than was made by you, the human who used your expertise, talent, and sweat to create your article?
Does anyone care? Does Medium care?
Yes, Medium does care and is currently wrestling with the issue as indicated in the excellent article written by Medium’s Vice President of Content, Scott Lamb — What Do You Think About AI-Generated Writing?
So what do you think? Do you agree with me that AI writing for money is cheating? Do you agree with the opinion that AI writing is simply a “tool” to be used by writers? What do you think of the idea of AI “leveling the playing field” so mediocre writers can publish work to compete with genuinely talented writers?
Resources:
https://apnews.com/article/what-is-chat-gpt-ac4967a4fb41fda31c4d27f015e32660
https://businessesgrow.com/2022/12/08/chatgpt/
https://acathrine.medium.com/9-artificial-intelligence-copywriters-to-generate-articles-98c7ea06b26c
http://catalog.yale.edu/undergraduate-regulations/regulations/academic-dishonesty/
©Joan Gershman 2023
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