Dear Reader,

These days, I see AI writing everywhere—on LinkedIn, in text messages from colleagues, and even in substack newsletters. There’s something about these polished pieces of prose, glib and formulaic, with their idiosyncratic sentence structures and excessive dashes, that end up depressing me.

Many of my writer friends won’t touch AI. “We can write just fine without it,” they say.

But I can’t stay away. I face my AI anxiety by finding out what this new beast is. As a teacher of management, and as someone who has pivoted careers three times already, I feel compelled to keep up with the times.

I sign up for ‘Prompt Engineering 101 for Journalists’ conducted by the non-profit Knight Centre. It teaches me how to prompt AI to ‘red-team’ my writing—to critique flaws rather than default to dishing out praise. And to watch out for AI ‘hallucinations’ like made-up names of books and fake quotations falsely attributed to real people.

I stay conflicted: is it okay to use large language models that ride on the backs of writers and artists, that have learned by scraping creative works with no regard for privacy or copyright? And what about the environmental toll—the depredations on water and energy that the data centres inflict, especially in developing countries?

I look for my answers in books about AI. Supremacy: AI, ChatGPT and the Race That Will Change the World........

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