The historical past of writing tech!
There’s been many latest revolutions in writing applied sciences, and I assumed it might be attention-grabbing to match them and the way in which they have an effect on the writer’s concepts.
We will break down the strategies of writing into a number of technological classes. Every new invention builds on the earlier expertise, bettering writing in numerous methods.
Hand written
Someplace to start with there was “cave portray”, and shortly after got here written language. Writing by hand permits permits a whole stream of thought, what you might be pondering goes straight onto the web page. Nonetheless this additionally implies that grammar and spelling errors are recorded too. Fixing these errors takes time and fixed drafting and revising.
Typewriter
Then got here the kind author, a tool to make writing simpler and faster. This machine allowed the author to give attention to the content material relatively than having to manually draw every character. It doesn’t cease errors although, this nonetheless requires drafting and iteration (though messiness was eradicated).
Computer systems
A comparatively quick time later, computer systems had been born and writers liked them. This improved model of the typewriter allowed writers to change the textual content earlier than committing it to bodily paper. Fixing errors was even quicker and simpler.
Autocomplete
And finally the pc was quick sufficient to verify error’s for you, with the invention of “Autocomplete”. This characteristic might present you which ones phrases weren’t within the dictionary and which sentences had grammatical errors. Generally it was proper, generally it was means off, however you’d often all the time see the pc suggesting one thing to you. Fixing errors grew to become virtually instantaneous as you wrote.
Generative AI Prompts
From the bleeding fringe of author’s expertise comes Generative AI Prompts. These techniques increase in your enter, and might output many paragraphs of well-written unique content material, based mostly solely on a single sentence. This expertise makes mainly no errors, so nothing must mounted from the output.
The Results
All these machines have minimized time and errors in your writing. However in doing in order that they’re turning into a much bigger and larger a part of the writing course of, till these machines can write whole items with minimal instruction.
However it’s attention-grabbing to look at the gradual results of this all through the totally different types of expertise. Take for example autocomplete, this computer-human suggestions cycle can subconsciously alter what you write.
Whenever you see ideas from the pc, you typically both choose a suggestion or ignore it. The higher the ideas are, the extra seemingly you’ll settle for the suggestion. This implies the higher the pc will get, the extra it is writing and the much less you’re writing.
With all this in thoughts, right here’s a subjective desk summarising my thought’s on every bit of writing tech:
Abstract
It’s clear that these AI generative instruments are nice in excelling in any respect surface-level metrics. They’re straightforward to make use of, simply kind a request such as you would to an worker and get a outcome. The output is all the time grammatically error-free with no misspelled phrases (information are one other matter). And in comparison with writing one thing your self, they’re extraordinarily quick.
Nonetheless, they aren’t nice at expressing your character as they’re educated on different folks’s work. And regardless that you’ll be able to shortly iterate to get what you need, you’re being subconsciously influenced by the ideas given by the AI. Which implies you’re not really recording your stream of thought, it’s the stream of thought from the AI. These two factors are what arguably what provides humanity to your writing.
The developments in writing expertise are superb and have given people unimaginable energy to provide top quality content material. I simply hope folks nonetheless benefit from the act of low-tech writing sooner or later.
Typed by Ben Winding, with out AI help