Artificial Intelligence Writers vs. Human Writers: The Experiment Begins

I’m going to run a detailed writing experiment and share it with all of you here on Medium.

A few years ago, artificial intelligence crept its way into my previous technology career. The premise was that it would make jobs in that industry easier by automating commonly used processes. It made sense.

At first, some people in that industry were concerned. Would robots be taking over their jobs?

Not necessarily. But as the technology becomes smarter, it will.

But…humans will also have time to adapt and adjust, and their focus will shift to more important tasks that are better served by human processing. So they will just move into different roles.

It will take decades for robots to take over a good portion of the functions that a human can do in my previous career. In some ways, I see areas where robots will never take over.

And yet, as we writers sleep, the conglomerates behind artificial intelligence technology slowly take over every industry in the world. Robots have made their way into writing already. Are you ready?

Why I’m running this experiment

Last summer I started truly focusing on my writing career. Therefore, I don’t have the years of content writing under my belt to make me nervous or angry about the technology that’s coming. My content writing path was always meant to be short-term anyway. I have time to adjust.

Because of what I’ve seen so far, I’ve made the decision to get out of content writing in the next 3 years. The technology is that impressive and I don’t want to be on a writing path that won’t survive. Instead, I’m going to understand the enemy, see where the real threats lie, and then switch to other types of writing.

But before I do that, I’m going to experiment with it in a big way. And take you along for the ride.

How it will work

I created a brand new profile on Medium a couple of weeks ago. I have short-term intentions for it now. As it’s brand new, it can’t join the Medium Partner Program and make money since it doesn’t have the required 100 minimum followers yet. This is perfect for my experiment.

I will use this “robot” profile to post the content I generate using artificial intelligence. I’ll post the writing it outputs, as well as my commentary on how I got it to write what I wanted, as well as what I learned.

It’s important to note that I’m still new to this technology so you’ll have to keep in mind that what I show is only a portion of what it’s capable of.

If you’re interested in witnessing everything (which should be free for everyone), follow the profile listed below this post. Heck, you may even want to subscribe to it to receive every delicious word my robot writes.

My robot

There are quite a few artificial intelligence programs out there that can assist humans with content writing. To be clear, none of them are humanoid or even machine robots. It’s just fun to use the word “robot”. The definition of “robot” is broad enough to encompass this technology.

Artificial intelligence is just computer software sitting somewhere in the Cloud and accessible to those willing to jump the steep learning curve or pay a fee for more intuitive programs leveraging the technology for their writing engine. It’s not going to come and kill you in the middle of the night. Think of the movie Her instead of I, Robot.

I did my research and chose a platform that’s easy to learn and has a good reputation. I didn’t spend more than a day creating what I needed. I’m pretty impressed with what I’m seeing. But I’m also worried for writers. This technology has come far. And it will only get better with time.

And this is why I’m sharing my results with all of you because it’s important for you to see what’s out there. I do feel strongly that this technology will take over most jobs in content writing in the next 10 years. If you do any research on the stats of this type of technology, it’s no longer a matter of if but when.

What’s next?

I took 5 hours last week to seed most of the blog posts. I’ve already generated 30+ blog posts that I will start publishing this week on my robot profile.

No, that’s not a typo. Sounds crazy, right? 30+ blog posts in 5 hours? And most are ready to go — I just need to copy and paste them into Medium and then add my final commentary tweaks.

Just a warning, much of the writing my robot generated is decent. With my editing hand, I’m not even sure you can tell the writer isn’t human.

Many are jam-packed with great information, too, mostly about writing. I’ve also experimented with different types of writing. Some of it is funny. Some of it will give you serious pause, especially if you’re a content writer.

Because it’s good enough to pass for human.

Most posts are less than 1,000 words. I did have to use my own human hand to make formatting and minor tweaks where my robot went off the rails. I’ve made it a point to change less than 10% of every post, minus one which will be notated. Most only had a few sentences tweaked or added.

In addition, I will clearly mention in every post what this experiment is and that the content was heavily assisted by artificial intelligence so there is no confusion on who wrote it.

You’ll see.

It’s important for you to see.

How long does it take you to generate a blog post? What if you could cut that time down significantly? Would you do it? Would you hire a robot to help you?

Would you disclose that you used help? Would you feel guilty about it?

The ethics of artificial intelligence writing

There are questions about ethics that have come up with this technology. I am slowly seeing and evaluating all sides of the equation.

If a computer is writing most of your content, do you own it? Does the technology company own it? What if it plagiarizes the content — would you know? Who would be liable in that situation?

Should writers who use artificial intelligence assistants disclose that they’re doing it? I ran a Twitter poll on this over a month ago, but I didn’t have a lot of responses. Roughly 2/3 of responders said Yes, but it was a very small sample set.

Is an artificial intelligence writer different than a ghostwriter? If you’re a ghostwriter or support the concept of them, does it matter then?

So many questions. It will get more complicated as the technology proliferates and becomes more commonplace. Long-standing values that writers held before may shift and evolve as this happens.

Let the grand experiment begin!

Want to check out the first robot-generated article? Here it is:

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