WRITING | AI

This One Unethical ChatGPT Writing Habit Users Should Stop Doing

Something writers are doing without thinking much about it, and it won’t work in future.

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I never thought AI was bad, but it’s when it is used to clone voices, fabricate identities, and build scams so convincing that people lose money, dignity, and trust before they realize what happened that forces me to think in another way. This version of AI misuse is loud. It is making headlines, and governments are making laws to deal with it.

Apart from this, I have noticed the abuse running through writing communities right now, and nobody is talking about it because it doesn’t feel like a crime. It has been named as workflow or creativity.

I want to talk about it.

What I notice is that someone finds a good article, human-written and genuinely argued. An article that you feel will take a lot of time to write. Now the real thing begins, reader, paste it into ChatGPT. Ask for a rewrite, and after minor editing, they publish the result under their own name.

They call it repurposing and productivity. They proudly share tips in forums and on social media, which prompts were used to produce the most “original-sounding” output.

It is plagiarism. The AI changing the sentences does not change what was taken. The structure and the argument belong to the original writer. The thinking. The intellectual work and time spent by someone to make it valuable belong to them, too. The person who used ChatGPT only wrote a prompt and published it. This is their contribution, and it can’t be called productivity or creativity.

As a writer, this should genuinely bother you. If you are part of any writing community, think about who is being robbed.

Unfortunately, the writers being plagiarised are the same people whose audience you are publishing to. They take their article, ask the robot to make changes and give readers to read with their own name.

AI chatbots are trained on writers work without their consent, so the whole thing is already compromised.

Acquiring data to train an AI model is a real problem. Writers are not compensated. This is wrong. But it does not authorise anyone to add their name to it. Two wrongs do not make a right.

While writing, did the original idea come from you? The observation, the angle, the specific thing you noticed while reading that nobody else said that way?? If yes, use ChatGPT to help you say it better. This is the way to use this tool, the same way a dictionary can be a writing tool. Nobody seriously argues against that.

But if you find someone else’s finished article while scrolling and give it to a machine to rewrite to make it yours, that is plagiarism, and you are a plagiarist.

You can use AI ethically: you read across many sources, you note down missing things and find a point, you have something genuine to say about it, you write a rough draft from your own thinking, it doesn’t matter if it looks bad initially, and then you use AI to improve your own sentences, verify your own argument, or find what you missed point of view. You entered the idea. The AI helped it make better.

This stealing content writing technique will work for a short period of time. Those who will matter in the next five years will not be the ones who first found the best articles to rewrite. They will be the ones who have researched to find a point to say and used every tool available to say it better. That difference will not disappear but will become more visible.

Writing means to write something that could only have come from you. Use AI to explain it in a better way. So, no one can argue about it.

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