This is just about everything you should know as you look to join us in writing here at The Age Academy.
– Publication guidelines
– Benefits of publishing with us
– The founding principle of our platform
In this age, there are too many digital as well as physical platforms giving writers the room they need to connect with a wider audience. Of course, we know that and we are not trying to be just another beef in the pot. How are we different?
We are inspired to look in the direction that the rest of the world are turning a blind eye to: the decision of being 100% human writers, plus actual originality and uniqueness. Here at Prof AGE, we want to boost about non-conforming writers who still continually to stand their ground in a time when it seems to be nearly possible to operate without this menace called AI. But why?
‘But why?’ isn’t even about the real question, I have gotten several other k!11er questions like, ‘Is that even necessary in an age where AI has evidently come to stay?’ And maybe a couple others that I cannot remember now since I’m not this machine in question.
In a nutshell, nonetheless, my response to whatever questions people throw at me concerning this dream is that we are all entitled to our views. I’m not forcing my stance down the throat of anyone but I have this to say: it might be anti-human to introduce that which is designed to directly think for us, because that way, we are subtly motivated to stop using our intelligence—the primary difference between humans and nonhuman entities.
One might want to argue that AI gets its results from the existing works of humans which is equally human intelligence modified, but before one does that, it should be remembered that not only has AI been guilty of intellectual theft, it is also never a unique technique for writers since it is not capable of inspiring anything intelligent—in the right sense of the word ‘intelligence’. Maybe it could come up with brilliant ideas but definitely not intelligent ones. Not to wonder why Professor Wole Soyinka proposed that this would be better as SI (Surrogate Intelligence) since Intelligence is only peculiar to the living, sort of.
Time and again, I have met people—myself inclusive—who can easily tell you when they are reading something from AI but guess what gentlepeople, this cannot be said about humans: you cannot randomly stumble upon a Chimamanda’s work and just immediately know she wrote it. In other words, this guy AI regurgitates ideas and drains creativity of its value.
Perhaps not superficially so, but in actuality, the world of creativity is now getting a lot boring and mundane already. I remember an event of my students going to AI to help them with a home task on How AI is the Undoing of Mankind. So pathetic. No, not just that, I have now heard of an instance of a lecturer using an AI tool to detect if his students used AI. Abysmal!! What event are we exactly preserving our brains for if we cannot be delighted in using it to our own benefit? I am so lost as to the necessity of this invention…
A Call to Write as Humans
To be realistic enough, I should open this section of the piece admitting that we have all been a victim of this vice directly or not, and that is the more annoying thing. Search engines came and the world was so satisfied with them—I’m using that as a point of contact because AI is but a more sophisticated form—then we began to use software services that help us detect plagiarism, after which we moved up to those that flag and fix grammatical errors. Although I was never totally agreeing with the grammar checker tools, it all seemed fine and life was going on as it always did until we woke up one morning and AI was almost suddenly everywhere in the universe.
Yes, AI is probably not as bad as I might be making it seem but it has developed into a thing a grave concern. I know of at least three people I was looking up to who have now relatively lost their inner voices; one of them, a close colleague, has completely stopped writing himself for about a year now. I thought he was really okay with AI handling the act for him until recently when he cried into my inbox to express his fears and doubt over his abilities…he has altogether lost his self-esteem alongside the voice he doesn’t think he will rediscover…Sammy lost his inner voice but it’s not about him. It is safe to guess that he cannot be the only writer in this block—it must have equally ruined several others, so why should we risk it at all when we have all the time in the world to use our intelligence for our own betterment? Therapeutically, AI offers something like perfection and that makes it rattling addictive for most people.
I know it is awesome and could be very inviting because I have tried it out myself a couple of times. It has the ability to fetch data that are not easily reached manually and it could give off that human interaction energy…But as for perfection, it is not close to it. See this scenario:
Until I decided I was going to totally abstain from it, I would sometimes go to AI for reaffirmations because I was too busy to dig facts up. On one of days—and in a very recent time, I took the question of whether there is an adverbial in the sentence, “Shola ate the oranges in school.” It says there is only a prepositional phrase in it and that is, “in school.” I had to school AI on how that should be considered an adjectival in this case and we went deeper into the conversation until I was beginning to explain the evolvement of one-word phrases in the English language to it as well. Funnily enough, I am not even the hundredth person who has done this to the machine…simply an indication that there is no way it is thoroughly an artificial or any form of intelligence; it lacks the capacity to think as ideal intelligence will allow you.
– Given that there is no perfection anywhere, it should be no news to every clear head that writing on our own instrumental in making us confident in ourselves by pushing us to embrace our flaws.
– I have always been of the opinion that the most beautiful part of writing comes from those petty, quasi-unnoticeable mistakes (sometimes understandably intentional too) we make. Huh, how I love this and feel better understood at such writings. Sometimes I smile alone when I hit such trivial mistakes in someone’s work, possibly remembering how I learnt to shake off the same thing…or thinking about what must have been on the writer’s mind when they were writing to have alighted at such goof…so sweet.
You know, it’s sort of comparable to the issue I am always having with linguists when they read my works and say, hey, this should be this or that…I tell them it disgusts me to be confined to certain rules of expressing myself while my head is working with a different natural flow and one that my reader would understand, and this is how several other literarians too see it, I guess. I mean there should be a clear difference between the ambiance that an English textbook and a novella creates. To me, I’m good if the basic rules of the language have not been severely hampered and the right information has managed to come off in black and white. It should be that simple…
Conclusively, it is in the nature of the average human to always seek defense mechanisms when there is no choice left. We see this in the fact that the same so-called writers who advocate for the essence of this machine are never so open to their clients about the involvement of AI in the service they are masking to render. I have had course to hire a couple of writers in the last few months myself and none of them admitted ever being guilty of this vice. But I have always known one when I read from the collections of this package…It is high time we became true to ourselves and face the harsh reality head-on, while also being an example of this change we proselytize.