iA Writer 7 keeps you honest

iA Writer 7, my favorite writing app, integrates ChatGPT (sort of):

The only person that can safely discern human from artificial text is the person writing. iA Writer now supports making the distinction. There’s no fancy ghost doing this for you. It’s up to you to decide how honest you want to be with yourself.

The new version of iA Writer ( not AI Writer) will keep track of the text you paste from ChatGPT into the its app. Authorship is displayed at the end of the document. iA calls the new open format Markdown Annotations, and hopes other developers expand on it.

I like it.

I think writers have soured on generative AI. Most won’t go near it as a matter of religious conviction, so I wonder which will embrace this compromise. iA Writer is a writer’s writer app. There seems to be a strong dichotomy between who uses services like ChatGPT and who doesn’t.

People’s opinions on new things do soften over time, however, right? I kind of love that the folks at Information Architects found a way to incorporate AI without minimizing creative efforts.

Of course, you sometimes must declare your pasted text as AI-generated. Pasting from desktop appears to auto-detect from ChatGPT. Most companies like OpenAI and Midjourney don’t seem too interested in creating a digital watermark for AI content, which I suspect would help here. It’s a problem. Ask Madonna.

Edit: I titled this post iA Writer 7 keeps you honest, but on further reflection I think it does more than that. I think it gives skittish writers permission to use AI without feeling like a fraud. Our memories aren’t always that great. And we sometimes forget to look back at our work with kind eyes. No one wants to read an old post and wonder if some AI prose slipped in. I don’t use AI for writing anything other than work outlines. But I can see value in a GPT assistant helping me flush out ideas. The ability to do that and document the process is pretty cool.