Much like Hsu & Lu’s article (2023), I, too, have a love-hate relationship with AI.
As a student, I see the benefits of A.I. It can help with idea generation editing, and even helps with shortcuts to publication. I have used Chat GPT to tell me what my paragraph is about. I consistently use Grammarly, and I love it when I can create a cool graphic in a moment. However, as a student at SNHU, I have often seen other students put my creative writing work into ChatGPT to cheat on giving me feedback and post discussion boards written entirely in Chatbot. After all, we are in an online program; how would the professor know? But, the most disturbing A.I. cheat happened to me two terms ago.
In my Screenwriting Thesis I course, we had to plan and write the first Act of our film. My first Act could have been more straightforward, but it was mine. One of my peers put the first twenty-plus pages into ChatGPT and gave me feedback based on it. This student is also getting a WRITING degree at SNHU, and I felt utterly violated. All of my hard work was given up to the Chatbot. My character names, inciting incident, and plot of the first Act were given away freely to ChatGPT because someone was lazy and didn’t want to take the time to read. Even though this seems like a clear academic integrity violation, SNHU hasn’t caught up with what AI can do in its policies (Southern New Hampshire University, 2024).
After this incident, I became determined to learn more about AI, so I chose a job this summer where I worked virtually with a company that edits Chatbots. I became the voice of the AI, which is pretty empowering, but I also realized that even though it is being portrayed in the media, AI is “taking over.” There are still humans at the helm. After going to unorganized trainings of 500+ people where the same ten people interrupt the speaker repeatedly, not being paid on time, and eventually quitting because of chaos, I realized that the future of AI is just that. Many people are trying to train a computer to think like a human, which is impossible.
When writing for the Chatbot as a creative writer, one of my tasks was to find a picture in the public domain and write creative pieces about it. For example, I wrote a sonnet about Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa (1506). In one of the lines, I made a joke about how I love the Mona Lisa’s bust but not her thighs. Admittedly, it is kind of a Dad joke because the Mona Lisa is a portrait of a woman from the waist up. It was rejected as a piece because the bot could not understand the humor. As Annabelle Barnum said, “humans will always be key to the advertising process…creativity comes from real human insight… AI is always going to struggle with that because it relies purely on data to make decisions”(Hsu & Lu, 2023).
Hsu & Lu (2023) proclaim that the marketing industry is warily embracing AI by utilizing its function and questioning its efficacy. My main concern is that we lose creativity in advertising and AI because of the loss of humanity. Still, I also love AI for supporting my creativity by serving as an extra reader or even creating the art I attached to this blog.
References
Da Vinci, L. (1506). Mona Lisa [Oil Painting]. Musée du Louvre, Paris, France.
Hsu, T., & Lu, Y. (2023). A Blessing and a Boogeyman: Advertisers Warily Embrace A.I. International New York Times, NA. https://link-gale-com.ezproxy.snhu.edu/apps/doc/A757729663/GIC?u=nhc_main&sid=ebsco&xid=f662808c
Southern New Hampshire University. (2024). Academic catalog. Academic Integrity Policy. Retrieved August 25, 2024, from htttps://www.snhu.edu/admission/academic-catalogs#/policy/rJJrxWQwt
