The AI Can't Do Anything Better than I Can

A colleague at work commented that she hadn't seen a chatbot outdo her on anything, so she didn't see a reason to use it. Even with as bad as the generative AI chatbots are, I don't believe that's true for me. I struggle to get words out when I try to write. If nothing else, the speed with which it turns pieces of thoughts into complete sentences or paragraphs beats me handily.

Maybe I can beat a chatbot at sounding like a corporeal person and not a corporate drone. Maybe my writing is less predictable, than the prediction machine's output. Even with my personality, such as it is, I'm not so sure I can consistently, reliably beat a chatbot at writing anything interesting.

I was a science major in college, so the writing instruction I got in my major was to have an objective tone, leaning in on passive voice. High school wasn't much better. I focused on impressing teachers with my best vocabulary and my longest sentences, thinking that if Dickens was such a big deal, that's what "good" adult writing was supposed to sound like.

My colleague could just that much better than me at doing stuff, or she could just be that much more confident than I am, possibly even overconfident. Regardless, if I think of myself as at least an average writing, that means it produces at least some written words better than the average person in some contexts. To me, it seems like there are uses where fixing the AI’s mistakes is fast than doing it yourself.