Use it or lose it – reclaim your writing power

Posted on by melissa

I have responded to a growing number of studies showing AI is making people dumber by launching writing workshops in regional Australia.

Interviewed on ABC South East radio, I urged individuals, businesses, community groups and government organisations to reclaim their brains by reclaiming their writing power. Use it or lose it!

These workshops tap into my thirty-year experience as a journalist, freelance writer, marketing agency owner, media and event manager and bestselling author. They support the genuine, human communication that keeps our regional communities thriving.

Just like our physical body deteriorates if we stop looking after it through nutrition and movement – our brain deteriorates when we stop using it.

Neuroscientists say that ‘neurons that fire together wire together,’; whatever you do often, you get better at. When one neuron repeatedly helps fire another, the connection between them physically strengthens. Cells that activate together start to bind together.

The opposite is also true. Neural pathways left idle don’t just rest. They weaken, and the longer they lie dormant, the harder they are to bring back to life.

Use it or lose it

People who don’t feel confident in their own ability to write or communicate clearly are vulnerable to being unable to think for themselves by handing their word-work over to AI.

There are so many moments in our lives where our words are vitally important. A wedding speech, graduation speech, obituary, assignment, grant application, new business idea, funding proposal, project update, story for the media, event announcement and so on.

Everything comes back to being able to express ourselves through words.

My grandmother used to be able to recall phone numbers, facts, dates and places with extreme accuracy right until she died at 92. As a farm owner, keen gardener and breeder of dairy cattle she was problem solving every minute of every day. She was also a musician, craftswoman, artist and a keen learner – enrolling in a computer course at TAFE in her 80s to keep pace with technology.

Nan loved a short cut, but she never relied on a computer to figure that shortcut out. She problem solved, went on fact finding missions and leaned into her practical, common sense.

AI is giving everyone an ‘out’ and presenting itself as a substitute for this critical thinking. The result is that everyone is starting to sound the same and we are losing the ability for unique, individual storytelling.

As the author of nine novels, including several bestsellers, AI has used my work to train its models without asking permission or offering payment. My novels focus on missing people and explore ambiguous loss and the ripple effect on families, friends, police investigators and communities.

They are inspired by my own personal experience of my cousin Ursula being missing for 30 years before being found.

AI promises to help you write a book in one day but AI hasn’t lived through the 30-year trauma of a 17 year old bright and bubbly teenager going missing, nobody giving a damn about our beautiful family member who vanished from the face of the earth, trying to navigate through the bureacracy and politics of the police and coronial systems and police investigators not investigating properly until two young detectives took on the case 26 years after her disappearance. A computer, no matter how many works of creative writing it has stolen to train itself, will never be able to create something that reflects my genuine, lived, raw and real human experience.

Businesses and government departments

I am also alarmed at how quickly businesses and government departments are willing to give over what makes them unique over to AI.

The key goals of marketing and communication are to cut through the noise and reach your audience by standing out, being unique, having a strong brand and offering something that nobody else offers. Whether that be a product or expertise or public services, your point of difference is what makes you a source of genuine truth.

Yet people are relying on machines to tell them what to say, how to say it and how to look from high level government departments down to the small businesses that employ locals and underpin their economy.

When everyone is singing from the same non-human song sheet, how do we distinguish the real knowledge, the real truth, from the AI slop?

By taking back your word power and reclaiming your brain.

*Sources of this article include: