Don’t call yourself a socialist while you use a technology built on theft that is destroying the planet to enrich yourself while artists starve. You should be ashamed.
You gotta love this idea that A.I. is "stealing" human work. No human writer creates his/her work in a vacuum. We all learned by reading and absorbing what others have written. Just like our A.I. replacements.
This is a weak argument. People’s works were fed into machines to build AI. This is theft. Period. I know this firsthand because I wrote a book of nearly 400 writing prompts for Simon and Schuster. I did not “steal” from anyone to create it. I worked out ideas based on observation, memory, and fantasy. In no way is that the same as the literal theft of my work that was fed into the machine.
Well, you can say that feeding people's writing into a machine "is theft. Period." But that doesn't make it so. I would argue that it is more analogous to the human act of reading.
Now, if the machine you're talking about is a photocopier, then I can see you making a case for theft. But if the machine is digesting the original writing to produce new writing then. . . I don't call it theft--any more than I call reading a paperback novel stealing a paperback novel.
If someone went to a lumberyard and stole a flatbed truck full of felled trees and turned it into a house it wouldn’t change the fact the logs were stolen.
Ah, but just to push your analogy a little further: What if all of those felled trees--even after the construction of the house--were still lying in that lumberyard, available for sale to a customer. . . would you still consider them stolen?
Couldn’t disagree more. A massively huge for-profit corporation stole the works of writers to build its product. Theft, theft, theft. This is why writers have won a lawsuit about this and have been awarded damages.
when a human steals another human's work we call it plagiarism. the thing i'm the most sick about in these inane discussions is how badly people who use ai at the literal cost of our children's futures is how badly they want us to validate their bad and lazy behavior. by all means foreclose your own critical thinking at the expense of the planet, just don't make me pat you on the back and say you're doing just fine!
"no human writer creates his/her work in a vacuum" is a ridiculous assertion to make when the point of the assertion is to justify what LLMs do with work real people made you tech apologist dunce!
You have almost grasped the definition of plagiarism, Tony, but I'll try to clarify it for you. Plagiarism is the act of one human being copying another human's writing and presenting it as his or her own. That is entirely different than what we are talking about here, which is reading the writings of many other authors and synthesizing new writing from them.
I'm a college english professor, I know what plagiarism is. your comment is remedial sarcasm at best. you smug a.i. defenders all have the same voice, a synthesis (to use your word!) of the same bad-faith ideas misinterpreted and repackaged!
You’re basing the idea that we’re doomed on the fact that I, a person who you only know from three comments on a Substack post, teach college English? As if (1) I. Like be responsible for bringing on doom or (2) you could possibly draw some conclusion about my entire career from this anonymous online interaction?
It’s so absurd I can’t even give you the pleasure of being pissed off. You’re a silly guy David!
Do your run your Substack posts through an LLM too? 🤔
The formula behind these "I’m a writer who uses A.I." posts is always the same.
1. mention Luddites
2. advertise/praise A.I. as a "democratizing force"
3. offer a personal anecdote to show how busy you are to justify your use of A.I.
A.I. is encroaching on every aspect of our lives with the same inexorable incrementalism that led us to give away our privacy in the name of safety and convenience. I'm not against using A.I. for the repetitive, boring work per se. But once writers (and musicians) start using A.I. for most applications, it feels like less of a Rubicon crossing to use it for ALL aspects of the formerly creative process.
go look at Victorian door knobs and fixings for homes: key strikes, locks, window latches.
walk into the State House in any New England state. look up. there will be an amazing ceiling there. pay attention to staircases. inlays, tile floors, wood carvings. go to older theaters. look around.
look at the blankets on your bed. your curtains. heck, the toys your kids play with. how much of it is hand-carved, hand-woven. where does the art on your walls come from?
the luddites were right. we lost something important.
what this does is make me want to stop watching new shows & movies. so job well done.
I've actually stopped all my subscriptions and don't buy any books. Not because they might be made with ai but the quality declined so much it's not worth my hard-earned money.
I’ve been struggling with the same problem but right now I have no solution. The content farms are killing everything creative (books, movies, music) nowadays. There’s no stop to it.
Thanks for being honest about this. Totally feel the same about using ai as a sounding board, which is especially useful at 1 am, when I'm starting to spiral into derangement.
I have started to pull back though. And not because I have a moral problem with it.
My greatest worry for myself personally is that spending a lot of time talking to ai and simply reading the ai outputs will lead to what I've been thinking about as "the great homogenization"
I already notice certain words and turns of phrase finding their way into our everyday lexicon that I KNOW came from ai. It's impossible not to adopt some of the speech patterns, the same as when you talk to your best friend on the phone every day. It's a shared language.
When I hear them, though, recognize them.... Truthfully, I cringe.
When/if everyone has the same shared language, originating with ai, then further instilled by writers who are influenced by ai, then adopted by people who consume the writing, it's going to get gross.
Maybe as the LLMs change and evolve, the robot voices will diversify. But if they don't, and things keep progressing as they are....well, that'll make me scream. Because we want weirdness right? Craziest part- the writers who stay away from ai won't even be safe, because they'll be picking up the same trends in the lexicon. They just won't know the trend was set by LLM.
I know I am speculating. So maybe Im wrong. What do you think?
I have actually been hearing that in every day language as well. And it deeply depresses me. I'm also not so optimistic that the voices will diversify, for reasons stated above.
Yes, and it happened already. There was an article in NYT about some politicians, British, I think, that started talking using... Nigerian English. No, they weren't from Nigeria, but the chat was talking that way and they followed that ai-pattern.
I sent this to a writer friend Dara, I'm a retired motion picture cameraman, over 30 years at all levels of camera work. I thought your essay was most thoughtful and it made a lot of sense. AI can be like the invention of the type writer, I knew people who could type as fast as they could think, nobody can write that fast. AI is a new tool, those who learn how to use it will benefit from it's power, not those frantic to put the genie back in its bottle, not realizing that the bottle is broken into a million pieces. Good for you, I wish you luck.
I'm the writer friend Dick sent this to. Former screenwriter back in the days when the words "original," "creative," "new" and "one of a kind" weren't illegal and nobody thought everything had to be based on IP and who cares if it's good so long as there's a 10% ROI? You know, back when Hollywood was fun? I fucking hate the intergalactic widgetmakers, because they will do everything bad that people worry about - it's what they do, like the shark whose nature is to eat you.
So now I write books (write what I am really interested in, the way I want to do it, with people who see their job as making me look good - of course I'm talking about a British publisher). I use AI as you say you do. Asking the right question has resulted in AI sending me to a site I would never have thought of, where I can find a downloadable 50-page now-unclassified report on that point. It's how I have the reputation of "bringing new information to this subject." AI tells me where to look, but I download the report, read it, see what's important, and use it. No different from going to the campus library and doing research like when I did my MA. Except a much bigger library.
What I have done is use my influence with my publisher to get them to put a declaration in their contract where the writer certifies on pain of contract abrogation that they wrote the manuscript themselves. Not much different from the certification I used to sign on screenplay contract that it was my own original work. If the Professional Golden Goose Killers over at the Wankers' Guild of America West Inc. put an enforceable declaration like that in contracts specifically about AI, they'd do a lot to lower the heat. But who am I kidding? Those dimbulbs? The ones who have fucked the pooch every damn negotiation since they killed the original goose that laid the solid gold eggs back in 1988? Dream on. In the meantime I'll have fun writing books reviewers say "read like a good movie" and be happy.
I genuinely agree with you here and appreciate how concrete you're being about how AI factors into your process. I in no way mean to be combative. However, titling this "Everyone Is Lying (Including Me)" and including the line, "That’s not optimism. That’s history," at the end of a paragraph, among a few other things, really makes me wonder if you used an LLM to generate all or some of the prose, despite your claim to the contrary.
If you did do this, I don't have a problem with it and in fact think it's fascinating! But it did cross my mind as I read.
I did not. I titled and wrote it. I did ask it to find typos and style errors, which I noticed it actually did fairly poorly (and is why I am rigorous in checking the info it gives me with actual experts when it’s researching). I do think a point made by a previous reader that we may all start to pick up language and syntax because LLMs *are* writing so much of what we read is a genuine concern.
And it is all a HUGE reason we need regulation and rules ASAP. I am under no illusion I can push the government to do it. But I do believe screenwriters and TV writers need to start being HONEST about how much they’re using it so the WGA can create guidelines. Otherwise it’s inevitable those guidelines will come from corporations and will not be in our best interest while they continue to use LLMs in their own.
Totally think it's plausible we're picking up stylistic mannerisms from LLMs, much as we pick them up from other humans on social media and from other types of writing we read. I honestly don't think that's even a bad thing. Language is always reacting to/absorbing new stimuli. The only problem is if that becomes the only influence.
I also think it's interesting for writers to use larger chunks of AI language as their building blocks, as you can see from already from folks like Vauhini Vara, Sheila Heti, and Stephen Marche. I've worked as a ghostwriter, I've always found postmodern projects like Jonathan Lethem's "The Ecstasy of Influence" super fascinating, and I'm into contemporary art, so I'm open to lit that raises interesting questions around appropriation and ownership. (Which was probably why I wondered if you were doing that here!)
The whole thing is an ouroboros of f*ckery when it comes to ownership. For a while, I held out hope that the companies would want to protect their IP and sue the AI companies for all the IP that fed the models. But it seems as though they’ve accepted that this is the way it is now, which means I have to accept this is the way it is now. Because if they can’t undo this, I definitely can’t undo this. Which brings me back to point number two in my post… the companies are already making money using LLMs trained by my writing. I might as well use LLMs as a tool to increase my chances of success by amping my productivity. I really really wish I didn’t feel like I had to but I do. And most writers are doing it in various ways, many of them lying about it.
I find Claude to be helpful in providing feedback on my fiction. It acts as a sounding board on sentence level writing and structure, just like the editors I worked with as a reporter.
I'm able to do this for a subscription that costs $5 a month. As a retired journalist on a fixed income, that's a great deal.
Editors/writing coaches and others are threatened by this. But their drawback from my standpoint is that their fees are extravagant. $1,500 or more for a three- or four-page reader's report?
Interesting piece! I love it for research but don't use it for writing, not even pitches. I would have to rewrite the whole thing to make it sound like me, and frankly I've never been a big rewriter, it's a lot easier and faster for me to write a solid original piece in the first place and tweak it. I don't have a problem with TV/Film writers using it, what I don't want is a situation where the studios use it to generate a season of "first drafts" then hire one writer and maybe a WA to "give it a polish" or similar. Also even with research I've noticed the LLMs getting dumber, more ...hallucinatory. They're now learning on AI-generated material in addition to all the copyrighted material they've been fed...at some point slop will eventually become its main "diet" for lack of a better word, and because it can only really put out an amalgam of its average input, the quality will get lower and lower at which point the purists (non AI-users) will prevail. Or... that's my hope anyway. I guess we'll see what happens...
I love this because I can feel your internal struggle because I struggle with it too. I personally love Claude and use it in the same way as a tool. I use it as my editor for my writing and help me generate a related image so I’m not using corny stock images. I don’t feel like it’s replacing my words or who I am, it’s simply enhancing and sharping my craft. BUT it’s very easy to feel some sort of guilt that comes with it. Every technological advancement comes with skepticism and unknowns.
I’ve used AI to write a film pitch. It knows what it needs, and I don’t. I wrote the acclaimed novel and adapted the screenplay. Would make a great crime series with its two sequels. Mass shooting vigilante thriller starts the trilogy. Asked the LLM to address it to David Ellison because he would be ideal. It’s fun if nothing else.
Used judiciously and always ensuring your production is checked, it is very helpful. Used as a sort of template it makes routine tasks quite efficient. It does randomly change small data items though (like dates and numbers) unless explicitly told not to do so (and even then I would check the numbers). Even used as the body of a letter (all about the new enterprise, space, class, arrival, trip etc) it would still need proper framing and rewriting so as not to sound arch and twee. Grammar errors herein are intentional.
I'm not and never have been sold on AI as a technology, but you are using it as ethically and practically as anybody can and I think you make an effective case for its uses.
Don’t call yourself a socialist while you use a technology built on theft that is destroying the planet to enrich yourself while artists starve. You should be ashamed.
You gotta love this idea that A.I. is "stealing" human work. No human writer creates his/her work in a vacuum. We all learned by reading and absorbing what others have written. Just like our A.I. replacements.
This is a weak argument. People’s works were fed into machines to build AI. This is theft. Period. I know this firsthand because I wrote a book of nearly 400 writing prompts for Simon and Schuster. I did not “steal” from anyone to create it. I worked out ideas based on observation, memory, and fantasy. In no way is that the same as the literal theft of my work that was fed into the machine.
Well, you can say that feeding people's writing into a machine "is theft. Period." But that doesn't make it so. I would argue that it is more analogous to the human act of reading.
Now, if the machine you're talking about is a photocopier, then I can see you making a case for theft. But if the machine is digesting the original writing to produce new writing then. . . I don't call it theft--any more than I call reading a paperback novel stealing a paperback novel.
If someone went to a lumberyard and stole a flatbed truck full of felled trees and turned it into a house it wouldn’t change the fact the logs were stolen.
Ah, but just to push your analogy a little further: What if all of those felled trees--even after the construction of the house--were still lying in that lumberyard, available for sale to a customer. . . would you still consider them stolen?
Couldn’t disagree more. A massively huge for-profit corporation stole the works of writers to build its product. Theft, theft, theft. This is why writers have won a lawsuit about this and have been awarded damages.
when a human steals another human's work we call it plagiarism. the thing i'm the most sick about in these inane discussions is how badly people who use ai at the literal cost of our children's futures is how badly they want us to validate their bad and lazy behavior. by all means foreclose your own critical thinking at the expense of the planet, just don't make me pat you on the back and say you're doing just fine!
"no human writer creates his/her work in a vacuum" is a ridiculous assertion to make when the point of the assertion is to justify what LLMs do with work real people made you tech apologist dunce!
You have almost grasped the definition of plagiarism, Tony, but I'll try to clarify it for you. Plagiarism is the act of one human being copying another human's writing and presenting it as his or her own. That is entirely different than what we are talking about here, which is reading the writings of many other authors and synthesizing new writing from them.
I'm a college english professor, I know what plagiarism is. your comment is remedial sarcasm at best. you smug a.i. defenders all have the same voice, a synthesis (to use your word!) of the same bad-faith ideas misinterpreted and repackaged!
You're teaching English at a college level. . . ?
On the bright side, I guess we've finally struck on one point that you and I can agree on: We're doomed.
You’re basing the idea that we’re doomed on the fact that I, a person who you only know from three comments on a Substack post, teach college English? As if (1) I. Like be responsible for bringing on doom or (2) you could possibly draw some conclusion about my entire career from this anonymous online interaction?
It’s so absurd I can’t even give you the pleasure of being pissed off. You’re a silly guy David!
"That's not optimism. That's history."
Do your run your Substack posts through an LLM too? 🤔
The formula behind these "I’m a writer who uses A.I." posts is always the same.
1. mention Luddites
2. advertise/praise A.I. as a "democratizing force"
3. offer a personal anecdote to show how busy you are to justify your use of A.I.
A.I. is encroaching on every aspect of our lives with the same inexorable incrementalism that led us to give away our privacy in the name of safety and convenience. I'm not against using A.I. for the repetitive, boring work per se. But once writers (and musicians) start using A.I. for most applications, it feels like less of a Rubicon crossing to use it for ALL aspects of the formerly creative process.
This is something I've noticed as well. Also, if I hear the phrase "AI is just a tool" one more time, I'm going to scream.
100%. It's as if these people think that classifying something as a tool automatically makes it beyond reproach.
go look at Victorian door knobs and fixings for homes: key strikes, locks, window latches.
walk into the State House in any New England state. look up. there will be an amazing ceiling there. pay attention to staircases. inlays, tile floors, wood carvings. go to older theaters. look around.
look at the blankets on your bed. your curtains. heck, the toys your kids play with. how much of it is hand-carved, hand-woven. where does the art on your walls come from?
the luddites were right. we lost something important.
what this does is make me want to stop watching new shows & movies. so job well done.
I've actually stopped all my subscriptions and don't buy any books. Not because they might be made with ai but the quality declined so much it's not worth my hard-earned money.
I’m buying books but now it’s trusted versions of classics and books written by authors who I’ve read for decades.
I want to support new authors as well but how?
I’ve been struggling with the same problem but right now I have no solution. The content farms are killing everything creative (books, movies, music) nowadays. There’s no stop to it.
Good lord this is depressing. I hope all writers continue to feel guilt and discomfort every time they use AI.
Thanks for being honest about this. Totally feel the same about using ai as a sounding board, which is especially useful at 1 am, when I'm starting to spiral into derangement.
I have started to pull back though. And not because I have a moral problem with it.
My greatest worry for myself personally is that spending a lot of time talking to ai and simply reading the ai outputs will lead to what I've been thinking about as "the great homogenization"
I already notice certain words and turns of phrase finding their way into our everyday lexicon that I KNOW came from ai. It's impossible not to adopt some of the speech patterns, the same as when you talk to your best friend on the phone every day. It's a shared language.
When I hear them, though, recognize them.... Truthfully, I cringe.
When/if everyone has the same shared language, originating with ai, then further instilled by writers who are influenced by ai, then adopted by people who consume the writing, it's going to get gross.
Maybe as the LLMs change and evolve, the robot voices will diversify. But if they don't, and things keep progressing as they are....well, that'll make me scream. Because we want weirdness right? Craziest part- the writers who stay away from ai won't even be safe, because they'll be picking up the same trends in the lexicon. They just won't know the trend was set by LLM.
I know I am speculating. So maybe Im wrong. What do you think?
I have actually been hearing that in every day language as well. And it deeply depresses me. I'm also not so optimistic that the voices will diversify, for reasons stated above.
Great points
wow this is actually something I had not thought about and that's scary (ie: words and phrases finding their way into our lexicon).
that's not great.
Yes, and it happened already. There was an article in NYT about some politicians, British, I think, that started talking using... Nigerian English. No, they weren't from Nigeria, but the chat was talking that way and they followed that ai-pattern.
"I am doing the best I can inside a structure I didn’t choose."
bullshit! leave it behind. go work in a nursing home or an elementary school. we don't need your shows or your "consulting" or whatever the hell!
I sent this to a writer friend Dara, I'm a retired motion picture cameraman, over 30 years at all levels of camera work. I thought your essay was most thoughtful and it made a lot of sense. AI can be like the invention of the type writer, I knew people who could type as fast as they could think, nobody can write that fast. AI is a new tool, those who learn how to use it will benefit from it's power, not those frantic to put the genie back in its bottle, not realizing that the bottle is broken into a million pieces. Good for you, I wish you luck.
I'm the writer friend Dick sent this to. Former screenwriter back in the days when the words "original," "creative," "new" and "one of a kind" weren't illegal and nobody thought everything had to be based on IP and who cares if it's good so long as there's a 10% ROI? You know, back when Hollywood was fun? I fucking hate the intergalactic widgetmakers, because they will do everything bad that people worry about - it's what they do, like the shark whose nature is to eat you.
So now I write books (write what I am really interested in, the way I want to do it, with people who see their job as making me look good - of course I'm talking about a British publisher). I use AI as you say you do. Asking the right question has resulted in AI sending me to a site I would never have thought of, where I can find a downloadable 50-page now-unclassified report on that point. It's how I have the reputation of "bringing new information to this subject." AI tells me where to look, but I download the report, read it, see what's important, and use it. No different from going to the campus library and doing research like when I did my MA. Except a much bigger library.
What I have done is use my influence with my publisher to get them to put a declaration in their contract where the writer certifies on pain of contract abrogation that they wrote the manuscript themselves. Not much different from the certification I used to sign on screenplay contract that it was my own original work. If the Professional Golden Goose Killers over at the Wankers' Guild of America West Inc. put an enforceable declaration like that in contracts specifically about AI, they'd do a lot to lower the heat. But who am I kidding? Those dimbulbs? The ones who have fucked the pooch every damn negotiation since they killed the original goose that laid the solid gold eggs back in 1988? Dream on. In the meantime I'll have fun writing books reviewers say "read like a good movie" and be happy.
Thomas McKelvey Cleaver
I genuinely agree with you here and appreciate how concrete you're being about how AI factors into your process. I in no way mean to be combative. However, titling this "Everyone Is Lying (Including Me)" and including the line, "That’s not optimism. That’s history," at the end of a paragraph, among a few other things, really makes me wonder if you used an LLM to generate all or some of the prose, despite your claim to the contrary.
If you did do this, I don't have a problem with it and in fact think it's fascinating! But it did cross my mind as I read.
I did not. I titled and wrote it. I did ask it to find typos and style errors, which I noticed it actually did fairly poorly (and is why I am rigorous in checking the info it gives me with actual experts when it’s researching). I do think a point made by a previous reader that we may all start to pick up language and syntax because LLMs *are* writing so much of what we read is a genuine concern.
And it is all a HUGE reason we need regulation and rules ASAP. I am under no illusion I can push the government to do it. But I do believe screenwriters and TV writers need to start being HONEST about how much they’re using it so the WGA can create guidelines. Otherwise it’s inevitable those guidelines will come from corporations and will not be in our best interest while they continue to use LLMs in their own.
Totally think it's plausible we're picking up stylistic mannerisms from LLMs, much as we pick them up from other humans on social media and from other types of writing we read. I honestly don't think that's even a bad thing. Language is always reacting to/absorbing new stimuli. The only problem is if that becomes the only influence.
I also think it's interesting for writers to use larger chunks of AI language as their building blocks, as you can see from already from folks like Vauhini Vara, Sheila Heti, and Stephen Marche. I've worked as a ghostwriter, I've always found postmodern projects like Jonathan Lethem's "The Ecstasy of Influence" super fascinating, and I'm into contemporary art, so I'm open to lit that raises interesting questions around appropriation and ownership. (Which was probably why I wondered if you were doing that here!)
The whole thing is an ouroboros of f*ckery when it comes to ownership. For a while, I held out hope that the companies would want to protect their IP and sue the AI companies for all the IP that fed the models. But it seems as though they’ve accepted that this is the way it is now, which means I have to accept this is the way it is now. Because if they can’t undo this, I definitely can’t undo this. Which brings me back to point number two in my post… the companies are already making money using LLMs trained by my writing. I might as well use LLMs as a tool to increase my chances of success by amping my productivity. I really really wish I didn’t feel like I had to but I do. And most writers are doing it in various ways, many of them lying about it.
I find Claude to be helpful in providing feedback on my fiction. It acts as a sounding board on sentence level writing and structure, just like the editors I worked with as a reporter.
I'm able to do this for a subscription that costs $5 a month. As a retired journalist on a fixed income, that's a great deal.
Editors/writing coaches and others are threatened by this. But their drawback from my standpoint is that their fees are extravagant. $1,500 or more for a three- or four-page reader's report?
This is exactly what I mean. It removes a socioeconomic barrier to entry that’s important to talk about.
Agreed. But it's a barrier that many people don't want to talk about: the class barrier.
Interesting piece! I love it for research but don't use it for writing, not even pitches. I would have to rewrite the whole thing to make it sound like me, and frankly I've never been a big rewriter, it's a lot easier and faster for me to write a solid original piece in the first place and tweak it. I don't have a problem with TV/Film writers using it, what I don't want is a situation where the studios use it to generate a season of "first drafts" then hire one writer and maybe a WA to "give it a polish" or similar. Also even with research I've noticed the LLMs getting dumber, more ...hallucinatory. They're now learning on AI-generated material in addition to all the copyrighted material they've been fed...at some point slop will eventually become its main "diet" for lack of a better word, and because it can only really put out an amalgam of its average input, the quality will get lower and lower at which point the purists (non AI-users) will prevail. Or... that's my hope anyway. I guess we'll see what happens...
Sadly, this has been happening...
I love this because I can feel your internal struggle because I struggle with it too. I personally love Claude and use it in the same way as a tool. I use it as my editor for my writing and help me generate a related image so I’m not using corny stock images. I don’t feel like it’s replacing my words or who I am, it’s simply enhancing and sharping my craft. BUT it’s very easy to feel some sort of guilt that comes with it. Every technological advancement comes with skepticism and unknowns.
The voice of pragmatic reason. Seldom heard.
Thank you.
I’ve used AI to write a film pitch. It knows what it needs, and I don’t. I wrote the acclaimed novel and adapted the screenplay. Would make a great crime series with its two sequels. Mass shooting vigilante thriller starts the trilogy. Asked the LLM to address it to David Ellison because he would be ideal. It’s fun if nothing else.
https://substack.com/@jonathanepps/note/c-227867470?r=o1irl&utm_medium=ios&utm_source=notes-share-action
Used judiciously and always ensuring your production is checked, it is very helpful. Used as a sort of template it makes routine tasks quite efficient. It does randomly change small data items though (like dates and numbers) unless explicitly told not to do so (and even then I would check the numbers). Even used as the body of a letter (all about the new enterprise, space, class, arrival, trip etc) it would still need proper framing and rewriting so as not to sound arch and twee. Grammar errors herein are intentional.
I'm not and never have been sold on AI as a technology, but you are using it as ethically and practically as anybody can and I think you make an effective case for its uses.