Now, using someone else’s work without their consent is highly unethical. But my own articles are fair game, and I fed them to ChatGPT so that it could mimic my writing as closely as possible. Then, the chatbot produced a short article similar to the original pieces that our team at ITMO.NEWS creates on a daily basis. The prompt was “controversial contemporary architecture of St. Petersburg.” Here is what the AI came up with:

The Bold and the Beautiful: Contemporary Architecture in St. Petersburg

St. Petersburg's architecture is world-renowned for its Baroque and neoclassical beauty, but the city's contemporary buildings are increasingly making their mark. As the city continues to evolve and expand, modern architects have been given the opportunity to reimagine the skyline, leading to a proliferation of innovative designs and eye-catching structures. However, this newfound boldness has also stirred up controversy among some who feel that these new buildings do not fit in with the city's traditional aesthetic.

One example is the Lakhta Center, a skyscraper that stands 462 meters tall and is the tallest building in Russia. Designed by the British architectural firm RMJM, the building features an asymmetrical shape with a faceted glass facade that reflects the changing light and colors of the sky. The Lakhta Center has been praised for its innovative design and engineering, but also criticized for its impact on the skyline of St. Petersburg, which has long been dominated by the neoclassical architecture of the 18th and 19th centuries.

I also took a crack at the same prompt:

Glass, Metal, and Plastic: Exploring St. Petersburg’s Contemporary Architecture

In a city that is as famed for its neoclassical looks as St. Petersburg, any building younger than a hundred years old can feel like a desecration. Yet as cities live, they grow and change, and so it is inevitable that modern architects attempt to upstage Trezzini, Rossi, Rastrelli, and other old masters. You can judge for yourself whether or not they were successful by following this guide to St. Petersburg’s contemporary architecture.

First, let’s look at the poster child of St. Petersburg’s architectural modernization, the Mariinsky Theatre Second Stage. Its exterior is covered in beige limestone, creating a squat rectangular shape that is broken up by large panoramic windows, making the theater’s foyer (and its spectacular illumination) open for all to see. Whether the monumental structure fits the city’s look remains to be seen, but its location right across the canal from the historic old building makes comparing the two an irresistible prospect.

To figure out if ChatGPT is ready for a career in journalism, I’ve asked my colleagues from the ITMO.NEWS team to guess which text was written by a machine. They were also encouraged to share their opinions on publishing fully AI-written articles. Let’s see what they think!

Elizaveta

I believe the first option was created by an AI. There are brackets in the second option – that seems too human. And in general, the latter is more lively in terms of vocabulary.

I enjoy reading articles by AI, sometimes they help you find a different angle on a topic of your interest. However, from my experience, you can’t rely on the facts it provides, so there’s no point in publishing a full-length text that you then need to double-check.

Catherine

To be quite frank, I can’t choose between these two based on style alone, but the slightly more opinionated expressions in the second snippet (“like a desecration”, “upstage”) make me think it was written by a human. It seems to have more “life” in terms of the author’s own opinions on certain issues and it is even a little bit ironic in places. Hopefully, I am not wrong.

I am rather wary of AI’s rapid, largely unsupervised development of late. If I ever did consider publishing it, I would state specifically that it was written by AI and also train the algorithm solely on the texts of one author, to try and recreate their specific style. In any case, I wouldn’t support publishing the text without any editing by the said author themselves. I believe that AI should be used as a tool, not as a “creator.”

Vadim

I’ve actually found it pretty hard to make a decision – both texts are coherent, eloquent, and similar in style and voice. Still, I’m tempted to assume that Text 1 was written by a human and Text 2 by AI. The first text features a few questionable formatting/accuracy choices that are inevitable for something written by an actual person. I’ve found that AI texts, in most cases, seem to be overly polished by nature.

Then again, I could probably easily make a case for the opposite conclusion. This was definitely a tricky task.

As for my opinion on AI, I would probably be open to using it akin to a moodboard or reference; as for publishing AI-written texts, I would refuse it purely on grounds of moral queasiness.

So, what’s the takeaway?

Well, this tiny experiment obviously carries little to no actual scientific value. I merely wanted to see with my own eyes just how warranted the claims of AI replacing human writers were. The results were not entirely unexpected (2 to 1 in favor of humans, hooray!), but it is pretty scary just how easy the entire process was. With ChatGPT, Notion, Midjourney, Worldly, and other such tools being that simple to use, it seems cybersecurity and anti-fraud experts will have their hands full in the near future.

Want to learn how students can use ChatGPT in other ways? Check out our article from ITMO’s meetup on the best machine learning and AI practices for the classroom. Want to see more fun experiments like this one? Look no further than this piece, in which ChatGPT tries explaining quantum physics to a real scientist!