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| Image courtesy of Zoha Noor |
I've just been editing an article to go up on a website that I work for. It didn't seem to be quite in the writer's usual style and was sprinkled with American spellings.
"Did you write this?" I asked her.
The answer was that because she had been unable to do the interview direct, she had sent the interviewee a list of questions and he had then sent back the answers "but he had put them through some sort of AI".
That explained why something felt not right to me. This man's words were somehow spirited but simultaneously seemed to lack any real spirit. I got rid of the verbiage and unnecessary adjectives and, hopefully, made the whole thing read better.
Coincidentally, I've recently noticed that this blog has had some huge spikes in readership: hundreds upon hundreds of views have been recorded in Hong Kong, Singapore and China. As it seemed unlikely that I suddenly had a huge following in the Far East, I checked with a tech-savvy human who informed me that they were all probably bots – looking for material that they could plagiarise.
Is this the way the world ends? Not Terminator-style, but with AI robots reading endless material written by AI robots?