I’m sure that you’ve heard the saying that “you can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear.” Alternative phrases are “putting lipstick on a pig” or “polishing a turd.”
In other words, if something is crappy, you can’t completely transform it into something worthwhile.
Yet we persist on starting with crappy stuff anyway…such as surrendering our writing to generative AI and then trying to fix the resulting crap later.
Which is why I’ve said that a human should ALWAYS write the first draft.
The questionable job description
Mike Harris found a job post asking for a human copyeditor to rework AI-generated content. See the details here.
I’m sure that the unnamed company thought it was a great idea to have AI generate the content…until they saw what AI generated.
Rather than fix the source of the problem, the company has apparently elected to hire someone to rework the stuff.
A human should always write the first draft
Why not have a human write the stuff in the first place..as I recommended last June? Let me borrow what I said before…
I’m going to stick with the old fashioned method of writing the first draft myself. And I suggest that you do the same. Doing this lets me:
- Satisfy my inflated ego. I’ve been writing for years and take pride in my ability to outline and compose a piece of text. I’ve created thousands upon thousands of pieces of content over my lifetime, so I feel I know what I’m doing.
- Iterate on my work to make it better. Yes, your favorite generative AI tool can crank out a block of text in a minute. But when I’m using my own hands on a keyboard to write something, I can zoom up and down throughout the text, tweaking things, adding stuff, removing stuff, and sometimes copying everything to a brand new draft and hacking half of it away. It takes a lot longer, but in my view all of this iterative activity makes the first draft much better, which makes the final version even better still.
- Control the tone of my writing. One current drawback of generative AI is that, unless properly prompted, it often delivers bland, boring text. Creating and iterating the text myself lets me dictate the tone of voice. Do I want to present the content as coming from a knowledgeable Sage? Does the text need the tone of a Revolutionary? I want to get that into the first draft, rather than having to rewrite the whole thing later to change it.
I made a couple of other points in that original LinkedIn article, but I’m…um…iterating. I predict that there’s a time when I WON’T be able to sleep on my text any more, and these days the “generated text” flag has been replaced by HUMAN detection of stuff that was obviously written by a bot.
And that’s more dangerous than any flag.
But if you insist on going the cheap route and outsourcing your writing to a bot…you get what you pay for.
If you want your text to be right the FIRST time…
Bredemarket 