Since the meteoric rise of OpenAI’s ChatGPT to 100 million users in just two months in early 2023, there’s now an elephant in the room wherever written words appear: “Did these come out of a human or a robot?”
At Four Minute Books, our current stance on AI-written content is simple: We will not publish a single AI-generated word on this website, nor have we ever done so in the past.
Here is our reasoning:
- Right now, AI-generated writing is bland, generic, and rarely original — at least not if you only use simple prompts.
- If you do continuously nudge AI to generate better writing with ever more complex prompts, the process becomes so long and tedious, you might as well write your own piece from scratch.
- As a writer with 9 years of experience who’s published thousands of articles, 2 books, and writing in every format imaginable, I can come up with better, more creative, more inspired work faster than AI — at least until now.
- There’s something personal, beautiful, and unique about knowing a real human took time and care, made a real sacrifice, to compose the words you are reading. AI can never replace that feeling.
Most people are bad at writing. We — me and everyone else who’s contributed to Four Minute Books — are not. That’s why, for the time being, we won’t rely on AI to do any writing whatsoever.
That said, we realize AI is here to stay and will only get better — and not just for writing. For example, we were able to use Eleven Labs‘ brilliant AI voice tools to create the narration for our video summaries of Hidden Potential and Same as Ever.
Those are the only two so far, but going forward, we’ll probably occasionally use AI voiceovers on our Youtube channel, especially if, that way, we can bring you new types of content that we just didn’t have time to record before! I’d love to clone my own voice, too, at some point, using this technology, so I can “narrate” more of our summaries “myself.”
This policy might change in the future. If it does, we’ll update it right here and on our About page. Until then, we’ll be happily typing away, bringing you writing by humans for humans — just intelligence without artificiality.
Last Updated on November 28, 2023