Inquiry #8: Quillbot 2

After experimenting with the paraphrasing tool on Quillbot.com I think it is currently more of a thesaurus for sentences than it is an actual effective AI writing generator.  When full paragraphs are fed into it, meaning tends to be warped.  Even for sentences meaning is often changed or lost, but it does seem useful for providing different ways of wording things.  I can see myself using it to find different ways of wording my writing.

I’m now actually more optimistic that this could be a positive tool for learners.  While I can envision a day when students will be forced to do in class writing assignments for fear of AI written papers that fear may be overblown.  Some help in writing papers can be crucial for students.  For many in current and previous generations this has come in the form of a parental editor.  Students will still have to perform writing in class, so some help out of class might be incredibly useful for some. The fear that the elimination of writing literacy will damage learners might be unfounded if the skills of reading and editing are focused appropriately.

Or maybe not.  I know there are English teachers and others who would argue that writing itself is a crucial tool for synthesizing and organizing thoughts that must be fostered and developed.  I think there’s a strong argument there, the act of writing seems to obviously be a helpful mental exercise for many.  Will AI writing eventually fundamentally change the way we think about and write?  The idea seems crazy on some levels, but I think there’s enough evidence around us already not to just dismiss it entirely.

The AI image I got today off the prompt “Quillbot” was particularly weird even by AI art standards.