Nerd for Hire

AI

My copywriting clients have split into two pretty defined camps when it comes to their stance on AI. Most of them explicitly do not want AI involved at any stage in the process (this is the largest group in part because this is the kind of stuff I prefer to write, so these are the clients I purposefully seek out). There are a few that take the opposite approach, though—where I'm either hired to edit AI-generated text and make it sound “human” or I'm given a topic and/or prompt and asked to create copy and refine it to make it publication-ready. 

Because of this, I get a lot of first-hand experience with AI writing. I also regularly use AI checkers, and have found that they vary dramatically in the accuracy of their results. I would say that a well-honed human reader is going to be better at spotting AI text, because it definitely has a distinctive tone unless it's prompted very well. I've also noticed some specific phrasings, punctuation, and sentence structures that often come up in AI-generated content. All that said, the difficulty that AI checkers often have separating human from AI text is a sign of how tricky it can be to identify exactly what gives writing that AI vibe.

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Gustavo Bondoni 281 pages Guardbridge Books (2017) 

tl;dr summary: Intergalactic expats return to Earth to find its humans now live entirely in a simulation.

Read this if you like: The Matrix, Vernor Vinge, Ann Leckie

See the book on Bookshop

 

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Star Trek consistently takes a human-centric approach to science fiction. There are a multitude of species and worlds but the focus stays with Starfleet and its predominantly human-crewed ships. More unusual compared to other sci-fi universes, artificial intelligence is almost non-existent. In the Star Trek timeline, the first android wasn’t created until 2330, hundreds of years after technology like the transporter and warp drive. Compare that to, say, Isaac Asimov’s I, Robot, where robots are common in the 21st century, but space travel is still limited to the immediate solar system.

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