Let me say that I don’t ever use a grammar checker. My wife refuses to use spell-check. Says she, “I think that an educated person should be able to write clear English.”
Yet, on a lark, I decided I’d have an AI write my next blog post.
Still working on carrying through on that. It ain’t as easy as I thought.
I thought I’d been keeping up with this AI thing. Nope. If nothing else, trying to do this has shown me that I haven’t even been close to keeping up with AI.
Naively, I figured, there’d be one or two out there to choose from. Good ones, I mean. Check a few FAQs, see how users rate them, look at some top ten lists. The usual drill, in other words, for buying some new service.
With just a handful of “good ones,” how hard could it be to pick one?
Wrong. There are tons of them out there.
The first thing I have to do is choose which AI to invest some time in, among the dozens that are currently being marketed for doing a task like this.
Not what I set out to do.
After peeking at a couple of Google searches, I have reached the following conclusions.
1: I don’t need an AI. Yet. Which was what I set out to do.
2: I need a way to choose an AI. Or two. Because, this is not a costless decision. As I understand it, it takes time to get good at using a (particular) AI.
3: And the more I look, first I need a way to choose a specific type of AI model. Because now that I’m trying to do this specific task, what Google shows me is a motley crew of specialists, not some kind of a Skynet, Jr. (Or would that be Sr., time-wise?)
Toward a classification of writing AIs.
When you see “toward” in the title, you should not expect much. Fair warning.
Well, of course I Googled — how to choose an ai — and read through the results.
I got slim pickings.
These folks give an overall top-25 list. That looked promising until I noted that the #1 rated AI is the one they sell. So take that FWIW. I won’t bore you with it. But the results of that search were largely off-the-mark for my task.
But: Googling – how to choose an ai to write a blog post – …
Writio.
Which I instinctively pronounced “righty-oh.” No clue if that’s right.
That search immediately gives me a vendor that seems to be on target, Writio. You give it a topic and ” … Writio writes new articles from your topic list every day, including relevant images.” The only thing I don’t see promised is that I can make it sound like me. So if I just take a while learning to write like Writio, at some point, sure looks like I could switch the blog to Writio-based content, and nobody would necessarily know the difference.
My job morphs from being the staff writer, to directing the staff writer, and editing the staff writer’s output. The staff writer now being Writio.
OK, anything else?
Beside Writio (and probably more like it, I don’t know yet), there are a host of less full-service AIs that act as writing assistants, rather than as writing staff.
Of those, the most competent ones are those that can write and interpret whole sentences. I’ll call them “inbetweeners” and “reverse inbetweeners”, derived from the hand-drawn cartoon job called inbetweening.
This vendor seems to offer AI-based writing, but it looks like you need to supply a pretty detailed outline. Then it fills in the sentence between your successive outline points. Hence, it’s an in-betweener. That said, the vendor offers ten “tones” available for their AI-created writing, so you can pick the one closest to the style you want.
Weirdly, this one does just the reverse. You give it the document, it writes the outline that matches that document. For those who tend to write that way.
Things go on from there. In the sense that there is a whole host of software writing aids that stop short of full inbetweener capability. These days, I suspect that all types of software from grammar checkers on up is getting relabeled as AI. That’s just the way of the world.
Clarifying the question: Generative AI
So I need to clarify the question. I don’t want an AI to work as my writing assistant. I want it to be my staff writer, coming up with a fully-written story, on a topic of my suggestion. Bonus points if it sounds like me.
A friend of mine filled in the relevant term-of-art: I’m looking for a generative AI, loosely defined as one that’ll come up with its own stories, based on a relatively short prompt or interactive session.
But barring that — if I still want the ideas and the “bent” to me mine — maybe an inbetweener is what I want. It’ll save me the tedium of writing. I’ll still have to work out the outline.
I’m going to call it quits for the day. AI already makes my head hurt, and I haven’t even used one yet.
I’m sure some of you already know all this stuff, but it took me a few hours to get my head around it. And I still haven’t chosen my staff writer yet.
Recap: Is it live, or is it Memorex?
The goal, restated:
Ideally, I want to find a generative AI that will write blog posts, in my style, based on relatively modest input from me, such as the topic of the post.
That I can afford, and so on. So I must add:
For cheap.
This may have been obvious to some of you, but it took me much of the day to get this far. On the up side, a couple of Google searches, and I already have one candidate to replace me.
So that’s progress. Obviously, the intent is to see whether I could fire myself from this blog, replace myself with an AI, and be satisfied with the results.
Ideally, you’d never notice. We’ll see how it goes.
