Among the most-read sections of The Star are the police news, obituaries, and letters. We think of the letters pages as the readers’ space. They are a key part of what makes this newspaper unique.
There are a few limits, of course, but nothing too outrageous. Originality is key. Getting us sued is also a big no. And, though they are as revealing about their writer as anything else, even very long letters are welcome. However, as I had to explain to someone recently, we say we run every letter we receive; we don’t say when.
There are always light edits to be done, such as correcting Errant Capitalization, but the overarching goal is to preserve the authors’ voices. A.I. is upending that, and it is getting worse.
Rather than make a letter better, A.I. produces a mind-numbing sameness. It is as if everyone used the same plastic surgeon but for words instead of cheekbones.
People get shitty when I ask about it, too. A recent letter writer was indignant when called out, and then, without apparent irony went on to explain that she had, in fact, fed snippets of her own notes and other personal material into the machine, and voilà! It was her own work, she insisted.
A.I. checkers are out there, but provide mixed results. For example, I suspect that Grammerly, a writing aid, will not rat itself out when queried. Other apps might evaluate the same text as 100 percent A.I., yet others 30 percent.
Policing the very many letters we receive each week is tough. Some A.I. submissions are going to slip through. Difficult, too, is knowing what to do with something that is only partially machine written.
As A.I. improves, it will become even harder to tell what is real and we will have to come up with some kind of addendum to The Star’s letters policy. For the moment, I hope our contributors will accept a sort of honor system and refuse the temptation to let tech speak for them. I’d much rather have to Decapitalize Every Word than expect readers to choke down missives that might be grammatically clean but in the end are as unpalatable as wet cardboard.