“If I rue anything it is that artificial intelligence came so late in my life. How I envy my grandkids. They will have A1 tools beyond my imagination,” writes columnist HUGH SELBY. 

Maybe one day I will rue the day that free artificial intelligence (AI) appeared on my laptop screen. But it won’t be soon.

There are a few reasons. Most importantly, it makes looking for information and viewpoints when writing an article so easy.

Instead of trawling through subject indices, newspaper records, journal articles, etcetera, I can start with a broad question to free A1 and then refine that question as many times as necessary to take me where I want to go.

And as a tool, it goes far beyond looking for information to use in preparing a CityNews piece.

Planning a trip, be it local, interstate, overseas, wanting route tips and comparing prices, use AI.

Planning a meal, wanting to know how to get great crackling on roast pork, and what to serve with it, use AI.

Searching for reviews of vacuum cleaners, sourcing spare parts, and what happens unhappily to the filter if you make the mistake of using a powder carpet cleaner, use A1.

Just in time

The just-in-time approach to life has been turbocharged with A1. Who hasn’t got a friend whose approach to a deadline is to get started at the last possible moment?

What has changed is that last possible moment: it has shifted to be so much closer to the deadline.

A1 magically produces so much of the information that not so long ago was a time-consuming slog.

It provides references too, some of them just pure invention. Academics, lawyers, students en masse, get caught when someone checks. Oh, the embarrassment!

The outrage expressed by teachers, and judges, is amusing. The vice is not the use of A1. The obvious vice is the failure of the user to check the references.

The less obvious vice is the possible failure of the A1 user to make any attempt to bring their own skill and judgment (assuming they have any) to the problem about which they, or A1, are writing.

Even less obvious, but still important, is how A1 can be used to ingratiate the user with others.  

For example, in this age of cancel culture, or writing applications for funding (as an academic, or community group, or even tendering for contract work), a few moments with A1 can help to ensure that the “right” vocabulary and tone are used. Pushing the right buttons has a more extended meaning in the age of A1 than pre-A1.

For students with lacklustre teachers, A1 is a boon. Once upon a time, when answering an assignment, the student had to read the assigned readings, make notes, think about how to approach the problem, develop their approach to the answer, then draft, check and recheck, all before submitting their work.

The problem for the student, apart from finding the time, was how to align their approach to that of the teacher. If the student approach did not match the template marking guide then poor results were likely.

These days the solution is easy. The student loads the assigned readings into an A1 program and then asks the question as posed by the assignment, or rephrased so as to reflect the espoused values of the teacher.

Hey presto, something close to the desired answer appears on the screen. Then comes the skill to finesse that “generated” prose into something that doesn’t look and read like A1. Easy enough: put in a typo or two, move a couple of paragraphs, add a thought bubble here and there, insert an unnecessary adverb or adjective, add an accurate page reference from one or more of the assigned readings.

The sad, or good, result is a better grade than thinking the whole thing through. Besides, it’s win-win. The teacher is happy. The student is happy.  The only unhappy person followed the old rules and didn’t understand that the rules have changed. Plagiarism is dead. Long live creative pasting with A1.

Has the student learned anything? I don’t know, just as I don’t know what was retained by students in the bad old days of pre-A1 essay writing.

Well written, read a lot more

What I do know is how I and my fellow CityNews writers, and you the readers, benefit from CityNews being a free publication, funded by advertisers.

Those who write for publications with a pay wall are doomed to “here today and forgotten tomorrow”. Not so for the CityNews team, dedicated to being well written and well read. 

If anyone wants to know about the parlous state of ACT finances, our prisons as expensive warehouses, planning horrors, the lack of any business case for the red thing on rails, all it takes is to ask free AI:  “What has City News printed about topic X since such and such a date?”

Up it comes, a useful summary along with links to the original articles.  “Well read” doesn’t mean by just today’s readers. Now those readers stretch far into the future.

If I rue anything it is that A1 came so late in my life. How I envy my grandkids. They will have A1 tools beyond my imagination.

Former barrister Hugh Selby is (usually) the CityNews legal affairs columnist.