Me, myself and AI — remaining ‘profoundly human’ in a time of artificial intelligence

A writer has a critical look at the dangers of using AI, and realises that being ‘profoundly human’ could mean the honesty to say you need AI’s ‘help’, but also seeing value in the creative reframing of a story to show that some questions might never be answered, even with that help.

Carmel Rickard is a journalist who writes about law, justice and human rights, mainly in other parts of Africa. She blogs at carmelrickard.co.za and is currently also working on a book of historical fiction.

Maybe it was the pope. Maybe a piece in the most recent Nieman Storyboard. Or perhaps my recent experience trying to find a missing doctor. Whatever prompted me, though, it was time to reflect on my relationship, as a writer, with AI.

In his new encyclical, Magnificent Humanity, Pope Leo XIV identifies many complex moral and other challenges raised by AI. His deeply considered letter is subtitled “On safeguarding the human person in the time of artificial intelligence”, and among many provocative thoughts he writes, “In the era of artificial intelligence, when human dignity is threatened by new forms of dehumanisation, ours is the pressing duty to remain profoundly human.”

Just what would being “profoundly human” mean for me in my work as a writer, I wondered?

Around the same time, I read a report on the Nieman Storyboard. It concerns a winner in an international short story contest whose tale now seems to many to have been at least partially AI-generated. The more I read about “The Serpent in the Grove”, now described as “attributed to Jamir Nazir”, the more I felt I should think critically about my own use of AI. I wanted to re-examine where a writer in my position should draw the line in accepting “help” from AI, for example.

And, given some other experiences this week, I most especially wanted to warn myself, yet again, along with other novice (and even not so novice) users, about the most important rule of all: check every answer provided by your new online “friend”!

As well as my usual work, writing about judgments and judicial issues across Africa, I’m involved in an absorbing historical fiction writing project. Through the course of this difficult, creative work, I’ve been more or less forced to come to terms with using AI, and thus with aspects of its “character”.

Some friends are surprised: Why am I using AI for my writing work? How do I use it? Will the end result still be my own creation?

To start at the beginning. Here I am, in the middle of rural nowhere, trying to write a different kind of historical fiction set in a very particular period of Sout