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AI Competes Against Humans in the Medium Writers Challenge
Four entries were created by artificial intelligence using keywords provided by the organizer. How did it fare against human writers?
A long time ago, I read somewhere that judges in an abstract art competition had awarded the top prize to a painting, which, unbeknownst to them, was actually painted by an elephant in a zoo.
On July 29th, 2021, Medium announced a ‘Medium Writers Challenge’, giving away cash prizes totaling US$100,000. Four finalists would each get US$10,000, and one among them would get the grand prize of US$50,000. 100 other “honorable mention” entries would also get US$100 each.
I’ve worked in the intersections of content creation and technology for the last six years of my career. And I’ve been an avid writer my entire life — both for work and self-expression.
Lately, I’ve been wondering if the age of Artificial Intelligence (AI) had already brought about a machine capable of taking on humans as a wordsmith.
So I decided to submit four entries generated by AI, posing as ordinary works, to see if it could ‘trick’ the judges and win some of the prizes in this writing contest.
