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An AI Summarizes My Journalism
How well can GPT-3 capture the gist of what I’ve written? “tl;dr, human”
You’ve probably noticed the rising tide of AI-generated prose these days.
Marketers are using tools like GPT-3 to crank out ad copy; students are using it, on the down low, to pen college essays. A public-relations professional I know recently told me he’d been using AI-authoring tools to crank out media releases for his clients.
“Honestly, the quality is pretty much the same as what I’d produce myself,” he said. “It’s not like I write deathless Pulitzer-prize-winning prose, even when I’m the one doing the typing. So I might as well let a bot do it.”
Me, I find our expressive Turing moment morbidly fascinating. It’s quite revealing about the human condition! It turns out that, in the workplace anyway, the Turing Test isn’t that hard to pass. In a world where humans already write like monotonous robots — numbly cranking out emails, brochures, and Powerpoint copy — it’s not hard for a robot to seem perfectly alive.
I’ve been weirdly champing at the bit to join this trend! This is some Philip-K-Dick bitcrunched dystopia going on, and I want in.
The problem is, I can’t really use AI to write my journalism. Not yet, anyway. The prose I produce —…
