AI HERE, THERE, and EVERYWHERE

 

If you use text-to-voice to proofread your writing, you’re listening to a creature of AI. I’m on record that I use this feature when going over my stories in WORD. (I should use it for emails, although, to my detriment, I usually fire them off quickly without doing so.) It’s a fine way to catch some typos, akin to the advice to read aloud your own chapters and catch repeat words, typos and echoes.

The mechanical voice is far better at this function because unlike the author or even the author’s human friends, it won’t read aloud what it thinks is likely there, per human logic.  Instead, the machine will sound what is, in fact, there on the screen.

Oops.

 

Then there are the internet searches. The largest search engine (rhymes with poodle) now brings AI results to the top of the first page. DH admonished me to not look at the AI findings and scroll past them. I refuse to ignore the tool because it is usually sound. Usually is the operative word. There are glitches here and there, so looking further should be good practice.

 

AI tools are also fun, as in fun and games. They play with us, creating images and editing photos, not to mention drive digital games.

 

Here is what they don’t do, nor replace. The human touch is unique in finding the road not taken, and AI never seems to. Whatever you do, don’t let it write your stories because you will never get anything surprising or genuinely out of the box.

 

AI is all about formulas, algorithms, and what was done before. Not just the tried and true, but the tried-and-true numerous times. Its best surprise is, like the old Holiday Inn commercials, no surprise.

 

As good (and improving) as AI tools are, perfection still eludes them. Case in point: the AI “natural voice” reader keeps reading every “oh” in my manuscripts as “OH!” (a la “wow!”), even when it’s the sighing kind. “Oh, this is sad,” comes off as either alarming or a cry of joy. The lovely female voice I use is as dumb as a doorbell which, come to think of doorbells, always sound like they mean to be punctuated by an exclamation.

 

Oh, well.