'There's a limitation' to AI writing, editing company owner says

Artificial intelligence (AI) threatens people’s willingness to think, Michael Hamilton of Good Comma Editing says.

Michael tackled the subject of AI in a recent issue of his Clarifier newsletter in response to the question, “How hasn’t AI killed your editing business yet?”

In his answer, he pointed out that AI large language models (LLMs) cannot create, think, or choose.

“Only humans can do these things, because we’re made in God’s image,” Michael wrote. “LLMs can merely mimic these functions, because AI is made in man’s image.”

In a recent interview, he added that while length restrictions of messages on Twitter (now X) threatened attention spans when it started, AI “threatens people’s willingness to think at all.”

“I’m finding that many people are able to detect that they’re reading something that was written by AI, and often, they don’t care,” Michael said. “But I think to a surprising degree, there is a disappointment when they find that out. I think they sense there’s a limitation in what they’re reading.

“You can tell, too, that the AI applications are being trained on the majority of writing, and the majority of writing is not high-quality writing, so there is a limitation to the quality that AI is likely to achieve. Readers are more appreciative that they’re hearing from not merely a live human, but a human who has given care to making things clear, clean, correct, and concise.”