ARTIFICIAL INCOMPETENCE

I mentioned in a previous blog that I lost my writing mojo. I'm still in that funk, not writing very much. I usually write every day, but not anymore. I had a few days where I knocked out half a chapter here and there. Then it passed, and I didn't write for a week. This slump started more than a month ago.

Fortunately, Adventures in Anxiety is complete except for my doing one last pass on each chapter with ProWritingAid in Google Docs, cutting and pasting to Wattpad, and doing another spell and grammar check in the Wattpad editor because PWA is garbage in Google Docs. The last check before publishing will still catch a dozen minor issues missed in Docs.

I don't schedule a date and publish until that PWA report is clean. This is not easy because artificial intelligence is horrible at nuance, slang, and unconventional word usage. It endlessly attempts to make your writing cold and robotic. It flags perfectly fine writing all the time, causing you to stop and check what the issue is. 

These unnecessary stoppages happen dozens of times every pass I take, even after I've told PWA to ignore that slang or colloquialism. The AI does not learn what you've approved in previous checks and keeps flagging it over and over. 

ProWritingAid is not the reason I lost my mojo, but when I try to write, hoping to work my way out of this slump, PWA frustrates me so much that I abort the mission. Using PWA is contributing to my lack of motivation. I am constantly annoyed, and when this is not fun, I bail out.

When I don't have the urge to write, I go into management mode, checking and fixing upcoming chapters for publishing. It's not writing, it's editing, but it keeps my head in the project. Then something awful happened this week.

I opened Chapter 39 on Wattpad. When I published it last week, it had a clean PWA report with zero errors. I wanted to make a minor change to a scene. When ProWritingAid turned on, it flagged dozens of grammar issues. I scrolled down. What the fuck? There were no errors in this chapter, and now PWA is lighting me up.

I'm a man of words. I cannot express how disheartening this discovery was. When I opened the Stray Cat chapter you just read on Tuesday, dozens of errors were flagged. I felt it in my chest. I'm working so hard, checking and double-checking, and now this?

How can ProWritingAid give a clean report to a document one day, save it, and then fill it with its stupid red and blue lines a week later? I spent two days checking old chapters. Each was riddled with red flags, 30, 40, or 50+ errors.

I know PWA is terrible on Google Docs, especially long documents like my 7k chapters. Still, AI is supposed to be learning and updating, right? That's what they're selling us, continuous improvement.

I'm going to list just a few bugs PWA has, like confused words. It will flag a word, telling you it's incorrect, and suggest the correct word. You accept the change. It then flags the new word and offers you the word you first wrote. What the fuck? Another stoppage to deal with a PWA bug.

The AI flags a comma, tells you to delete it, and when you do, it suggests a comma. What the fuck?  It flags periods, question marks, and quotation marks, telling you to add that punctuation precisely where you already placed it. PWA has serious bugs in not detecting the punctuation you place at the ends of sentences.

This is the worst bug. PWA suggests a change. You accept it. That change requires adding a word or punctuation. It adds the needed item, but not a space, so the words are mashed together. It flags that error, but DO NOT accept the change. It will mangle that sentence, rearranging letters that you must now correct manually.

I deleted ProWritingAid and installed Grammarly. I never liked Grammarly, so I switched to PWA in February. However, I also never paid for Grammarly. I used the free version. Yesterday I subscribed. I'm paying for it and rechecking EVERY DAMN CHAPTER.