To AI or not to AI?
Well, isn’t that the question?
As someone who trades in words for a living, the ever-encroaching presence of AI is an intimidating one. Of late, when I’m asked what I do for a living, the follow-up question is always, ‘What do you think of AI?’. And my response is generally a bit flippant.
There’s no doubt that AI is useful for those who don’t have a pedantic and long-standing love for grammar, syntax and morphology. Many friends have confided in their love of the software for writing social copy, sprucing up a CV or generating a job description — and if it helps you to churn out something quickly to your benefit, then I shouldn't be one to chastise. But just how reliable is it?
A large part of my day job involves writing in a mixture of American and British English — I still cringe at having to use ‘z’s in place of ‘s’s, but that’s by-the-by. Often, the target audience and language will dictate how a comma is used (the States love an Oxford) or if a word is compounded or hyphenated. Google can be slightly remiss when it comes to researching such pernickety details — should I trust a site that isn’t as reliable as the Oxford English Dictionary, particularly when writing in American English? In these instances, I have turned to ChatGPT.
Sometimes, it nails it. I have my answer, I use a hyphen, and I move on. In many other instances, the water is rather murkier. AI advises me to use the hyphen. I stop and think. Surely not? Now I’m seeing it in black and white, I question the certainty of its assertions and type my challenge: ‘Are you sure?’
Take the terms ‘ground-breaking’ and ‘groundbreaking’ as an example. According to chat GPT, ‘groundbreaking’ is used in both US and UK English if it ‘is used as an adjective to describe something innovative or pioneering’. Cool, that seems clear. But what if it is used as a compound modifier before a noun? Chat GPT struggled here.
‘When used as a compound modifier before a noun, both US and UK English should use a hyphen:
US English: "It was a groundbreaking event in the history of science."
UK English: "It was a ground-breaking event in the history of science."'
Spot the error?
Poor old ChatGPT has omitted the hyphen in the first instance. I flagged this a number of times, and whilst it was terribly apologetic, I had to prompt it a further four times before it corrected itself. Indeed, Grammarly (a type of AI I do rely on to sense-check my writing) got a bit confused as I wrote this.
I understand that this enquiry requires rather a lot of pedantry. But it also takes someone who understands the intricacies of grammar to spot it. If, unlike me, this doesn’t float your boat, you could be led astray.
Ultimately, ChatGPT is still learning. This exercise is only helping it to do so — and potentially contributing to the downfall of copywriting as a human endeavour. But people can gauge tonality much more emphatically than a machine can. We can use our memory, however fallible, to challenge preconceived, generated responses, no matter the data pool they’re drawn from. For now, I think my fellow writers and I are safe.
