A few days before she was sacked last week, a Cabinet secretary gave a speech at a university. A copy of it was shared on our newsroom WhatsApp forum. It was a typical official serving – formal, full of platitudes, written to be read and forgotten. 

But the speech had a more intriguing element. Part of it appeared to have been written by a chatbot or an artificial intelligence-aided text generator. 

In that respect, the now ex-CS is not alone. More and more Kenyans are using bots to cobble up speeches, complete academic assignments or write articles for newspapers. Or they are hiring PR agencies and media relations advisers who, unbeknownst to them, use AI for such tasks. 

In our newsroom, the Opinion Desk receives at least two articles a day that we suspect are written by virtual assistants like ChatGPT. They are sent in by people ranging from university students and activists to bureaucrats, politicians and CEOs. 

It doesn’t take any special technical skills or computer software to determine whether an article was written by a bot or a human – only an inclination for critical reading and an interest in how writing works. 

How can we tell? For one thing, chatbot-generated text is too unnaturally consistent in style, grammar and tone, making it sound stiff and … robotic. 

Bots betray themselves in other ways. As they don’t have “personal” anecdotes or experiences to draw on to enrich an essay or article, what they generate is bland, like an unspiced samosa. They also repeat information or overused transition and formulaic phrases like ‘additionally’, ‘furthermore’, ‘consequently’ and ‘in conclusion’.  

Because bots are trained on mountains of already published information, they can’t produce truly original ideas or insights. They just regurgitate the little they know based on prompts users give them.

Some journalists have been experimenting with chatbots to see how these can be exploited for routine, time-consuming tasks – such as manually summarising long reports, and transcribing audio and video recordings – so that reporters can concentrate on the writing aspect of their work. 

One major frustration they have reported is that chatbots are unable to cite sources of information accurately, even when prompted to do so multiple times. Another is that they ‘hallucinate” or make factual errors. 

Humans, in contrast, can cite sources accurately and integrate them neatly into their writing. Our writing is also more natural and authentic, varying in style and tone even within the same piece of prose (one moment a writer is grave and serious, the next he’s humorous and relaxed). 

It’s also distinctly human to digress when writing (as in talking), using tangents and parenthetical asides, as I just did in the opening clause of this sentence. We routinely make grammatical, punctuation and typographical errors, because either we haven’t mastered a language well enough or are rushing through a writing assignment. 

These imperfections and unpredictability can add character to our writing, making it far more interesting.

We can do other things bots can’t. We tend to use personal anecdotes or experiences to spice up our writing. Our sentences and word choices vary greatly. The best writers are particularly adept at using rhetorical devices and figurative expressions. They can come up with spur-of-the-moment phrases that no one else has used before.

These observations are not meant to suggest that chatbots have nothing redeeming about them. As they get better, they will become legitimate heirs to the search engines that we now find indispensable for research and fact-checking. And they will be used to do more.

Beyond our borders, things are moving much faster. Some newsrooms are already experimenting with AI to write certain types of articles, but human oversight will always be needed. In our own country, I’m not aware of any such structured experiments, and bots are just another imported tool for the lazy among us who need shortcuts and don’t want to sweat to produce original writing. 

—  The writer is a Sub-Editor with People Daily