Does anyone else do their writing on Google Docs? They've had this AI feature that I got the option to beta test about a year ago. I had fun playing with it a bit, giving it writing prompts to see what it would come up with, but I've never used it for my real writing. The little stories it wrote reminded me of how I wrote as a kid - a lot of telling, not showing. Plus, the writing, while technically proficient, comes across as very generic and soulless - just what you'd expect from something written by a computer and not a real human being.
Anyway, today when I opened my doc to write, I noticed a new sidebar on the right side of the screen called Gemini, which I guess is the new name for Google's AI tool. It had a summary of the content of the first few chapters in the doc that was surprisingly correct and coherent. I've been playing around with opening other stories and asking Gemini to summarize them, and it's crazy how quickly and accurately it can do it. It does have its limitations - it can't seem to read poetry and only summarizes part of longer documents. Still a cool tool, but also a little scary... 😳
Has anyone else played around with AI for writing or anything else? Thoughts?
I've never really used Google docs. We used it at school. Everyone's iPads were linked to it and I used it that way, but never just for me. I stick with Word because that's what I've always used. I have never used AI for anything. I did notice that when I post onto AO3, occasionally if I stay on a button too long or hit the wrong one with my sausage fingers, sometimes a prompt will come up saying let chatGPT fix this for you. No thanks! One day Mersey and I were playing around with the chat feature. More her then me. We were talking about how some of the writing on sites like reddit seem like the stories are all generically written so I was giving her prompts, and she was putting them into the AI and then short stories were coming up. LOL Like you said, it was accurate when it came to summarizing but it was also flat and definitely made by computer. I'm just glad that as a teacher, I don't have to deal with that. Do you have kids trying to use AI to pass off as their own? I would think 4th grade is still young to try that crap, but you never know.