Issue #13. I’m not superstitious.*

On today’s quest:

— Tracking changes
— Rubber ducking
— How companies are adapting to AI

Trend: Tracking Your AI Use

Two prominent companies in the writing and editing world launched AI products last week with an interesting spin: they help you track your AI use.

First, Intelligent Editing, makers of PerfectIt, a tool many professional editors use for consistency and style checking, launched a Microsoft Word add-on called Draftsmith.ai that gives AI editing suggestions for different purposes (writing in plain language, reducing word count, cleaning up transcripts, etc.) — but importantly, it makes these suggestions in a track-changes window so you can easily review and accept, reject, or modify the suggestions.

Second, the popular word processing app iA Writer released an update that makes it easy to track what parts of a document you wrote and what parts you pasted in from AI (or any other source).

iA Writer also posted two especially thoughtful pieces on their thinking behind taking the “tracking” approach (No AI Feature and Writing with AI).

I especially like these approaches because as anyone who has used tools like ChatGPT knows, even though they can save you time, you almost never get text you can use without edits. Which leads to my next thought …

Thoughts: AI as Rubber Ducking

Christopher Penn responded to a post on Threads about how to overcome writers block by saying, “I use generative AI like ChatGPT to spit out a draft and then hate how it wrote it, yell at it, and write it myself ... and it works every time,” and I’ve done the same thing when I’m struggling to get started on something.

I find this to be similar to the way I hear fiction writers hash out plot or character problems by “talking about it” with their pets, and it also feels similar to something tech people call “rubber duck debugging” — explaining code line by line to a (real or metaphorical) rubber duck.

The process of explaining what I want and revising it when ChatGPT fails can help me better formulate in my own mind what I’m trying to do and helps me overcome writers block and get my own thoughts down faster.

I’ve often wished I had a writing partner, and that seems to be how iA Writer and Draftsmith are setting up their new AI tools.

FWIW, a counter-point to this method I’ve seen people discuss is that it’s harder to clean up a bad draft than to write something yourself from scratch, and that you can fall into the trap of working within the confines of the AI-generated draft, which limits how you think (for example, keeping the structure and just cleaning up the tone or wording).

I agree, and I’ve had this problem with drafts written by both humans and AI. (And it’s much more painful to throw out a whole draft from a human than from AI.) I think your mindset is important here. I don’t view AI as something that is writing a first draft that I can just lightly revise. I view it as more of a brainstorming tool.

News

‘Science’ overturns ban on ChatGPT-written papers

“The publishing arm of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) says authors will be permitted to use ‘AI-assisted technologies as components of their research study or as aids in the writing or presentation of the manuscript’ as long as their use is noted in both their cover letters and in the acknowledgements sections of any submitted papers. Continuing its existing policy on authorship, AI should not be listed as an author or co-author, nor should sources cited in ‘Science’ journals be authored ‘in whole or in part’ by AI tools.” — Times Higher Education (h/t Katharine O’Moore-Klopf)

Google Search Is Adapting In The Age Of Generative AI

Google continues to make changes to search in response to the threat AI poses to its core search business. The most interesting to me (and potentially most troublesome to anyone whose ever managed internet comments) is that the company has started a test that will allow “people to leave publicly visible notes on search results … It effectively places an internet comment section on top of the results page. If you search for a recipe that calls for meat, for instance, someone can append a Note sharing a vegetarian substitute. Search for a website with timely information, and someone can add a Note when it’s outdated. If one website is easy to navigate and another is a nightmare, you can add a Note helping others determine which to visit.” What could possibly go wrong? — Big Technology

Klarna freezes hiring because AI can do the job instead

The CEO of Klarna, a Swedish buy-now-pay-later giant, says the company has stopped hiring anyone except engineers, and he expects it will shrink through attrition as more and more tasks are handled by AI. He doesn’t expect layoffs for now, but says, “Things that previously took people a lot of time can be done much faster and much shorter, and we need fewer people to do the same thing. The right thing for us is just to say: ‘let’s not recruit now, let’s see how this plays out’.” — The Telegraph

What is AI Sidequest?

Using AI isn’t my main job, and it probably isn’t yours either. I’m Mignon Fogarty, and Grammar Girl is my main gig, but I haven’t seen a technology this transformative since the development of the internet, and I want to learn about it. I bet you do too.

So here we are! Sidequesting together.

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^{*  But if this is the last newsletter you ever get from me, it was an honor to serve you.}

^{Written by a human.}