Using AI Responsibly
A Guide to Harnessing the Power of Artificial Intelligence
Tech Talk

We had a couple of interesting comments on our Island Arts Magazine Facebook page after sharing an article from a recent issue. The commenters disagreed with the article's premise; one suggested the author used AI to generate her story.

That raised the question of how we should approach AI content in our magazine and websites.

I have been experimenting with AI for several months and used different models and services. The learning curve has been exciting, perplexing, and sometimes downright scary.

What I have discovered so far (subject to re-evaluation) is that AI can be a very useful tool if used responsibly. It is the concept of responsible use that has me perplexed.

One concern is plagiarism or copyright infringement. I have a subscription to Grammarly Pro, primarily for grammar and spell check, but Grammarly also provides several other functions I find very useful. Plagiarism check compares the text to billions of website content, looking for exact matches on sentence fragments, highlighting those fragments and citing the source. This allows me to rewrite those fragments.

Another issue I found was that sometimes, the AI-generated content needs to be corrected. This is where my knowledge of the subject comes in and allows me to research further and correct any factual errors.

The third issue was using AI-generated content as is. Humans and other AI services can detect AI content as the text can be repetitive and predictable. Thankfully, there are AI tools that can detect AI-generated text and can then provide a score as a percentage of human writing.

This has allowed me to create a workflow to use AI responsibly (I hope).

1. Use AI to generate ideas for an article or blog - if I need help.
2. Craft a prompt using the 5 Ws and H (who, why, where, when, what and how)
3. Generate an article using any AI generator.
4. Use Grammarly to check for plagiarism and rewrite it
5. Use Grammarly to check spelling and grammar
6. Use an AI-generated content check to get a human written score, and rewrite any text identified as AI-generated until my score is 99 or better.
7. Publish the article or blog.

This article has not used any AI-generated text but has been spell and grammar corrected by Grammarly.

The scary part, by the way, was this going to put my job at risk. Maybe, but not yet!