At the outset of this year, I committed myself to growing as a writer both in skill and in quantity. In my role as a teacher and preacher, I have written thousands of words a week for over a decade, and I’ve enjoyed seeing some other short pieces published in a few denominational publications. This year, my plan is to dedicate myself to the task with greater fervor, which, to be honest, is going so-so as I write this in June. I suppose I suffer from a common fear that many writers experience—fear of failure—but I am serious about pushing through.
A couple of years ago, I began to use a proofreading and editing app called Grammarly. It has a number of helpful features that have only grown and been enhanced as AI continues to evolve. I like Grammarly. I suppose I took grammar in my dubious high school career, but I can hardly remember one thing I was taught. Grammarly holds your hand as you write, offering grammatical corrections and suggestions to sharpen the end result (I can’t believe how much I use the passive voice!) I signed up for a “pro” account and connected the app to Pages in order to provide ready help as I take up the writing task.
Recently, after several months, I deactivated Grammarly’s connection to Pages and banished it to its online platform. Here’s why—I’m convinced that if I’m going to grow as a writer, I need to go through the work of actually learning how to do it better. The constant presence of grammatical suggestions increasingly began to seem that the app had too much of an influence on what I was writing. Its AI tendrils were creeping into the act of writing, and it was no longer functioning merely as a proofreader checking for mistakes. I decided to untether the app from my writing software and experienced an immediate and noticeable benefit. I am back to living and dying by what comes to mind as I work on an initial draft, and I no longer experience the low-grade agitation of Grammarly’s constant presence and suggestions. I am convinced that if I am going to grow to be the best version of myself as a writer, I must reject the pervasive and growing influence of AI looking over my shoulder and guiding my keyboard strokes.
I continue to use Grammarly, but only after I have completed a draft that I feel comfortable with. It has layers of functionality from simple spelling and punctuation checks to aggressive rewriting suggestions that I can toggle through as I see fit. All of this allows me to use it as a tool after I’m done with the actual writing and helps me to feel control over the process. I’m grateful for the grammar mistakes it highlights (I am getting better at avoiding the passive voice), but I very selectively and rarely take other suggestions. As an avid reader and amateur writer, I am increasingly allergic not only to the product that AI produces in these realms but also to its pernicious influence.
For instance, I wrote a book review for our denomination’s journal last week that began with describing the book as “a lungful of oxygen in the thin air of our egalitarian age.” As I allowed Grammarly to do its thing during final editing, it suggested changing that line to “a breath of fresh air.” Pound sand Grammarly! While perhaps a more familiar and smoother rewrite, it gutted the vividness that I enjoyed in the language I employed. This is the sort of thing I see everywhere in the AI slop being passed off as original social media and blog posts—smoothed-out and sanitized writing. And no, I will not stop using the em dash, which has been a friend of mine long before AI raised its oppressive specter.
I guess I’m saying that, like everyone else, I am working to discover what a healthy relationship with AI is for me. I’m not a Luddite by nature, but I am violently opposed to a future in which creative tasks are offloaded to computer machinations. I love art in all its various expressions, and I hate the idea that creative types will be replaced with “good enough” computer-generated productions. For now, I’ll continue to benefit from some of Grammarly’s tools, but I’m not promising that I won’t give it the old pink slip and shut it down for good one day. For me, it is onward and upward with writing, and AI can peek its ugly head under the curtain only when I decide if I want it to.