Autocomplete functions are all around us, from our phones to our word process applications (unless you’re like me, and turn them off because they annoy you). Most of them only attempt to finish the word you’re currently writing, but increasingly they will attempt to predict the rest of the phrase you might be employing (which probably speaks to Orwell’s criticism of the unoriginality of modern language usage). Now, tools that leverage artificial intelligence can predict entire paragraphs of writing, rewrite your paper for you, and may one day do the first draft, too.
The Nature newsletter this week featured the article “Could AI help you to write your next paper?” which discussed these very tools. I already wrote a full-length post on some of my thoughts, which will be published in a few months, but I wanted to share the article itself with you while it remains current. Speaking of which, I should probably try to write a post on artificial intelligence soon, since it is one of those deeply misunderstood trendy technology terms that I like to try to explicate.
While I don’t think that AI is going to put authors out of a job any time soon, and it’s unlikely to make scientific papers any easier to read, I thought the technology was quite interesting, and it made me think more about what my process for writing actually is, at the nuts-and-bolts level of word choice and sentence structure. Anyway, I hope you find the article to be of interest, too, and I’d be happy to discuss further in the comments.
IGC Publishing 