Grant Writers, Let's Not Panic About AI
If you’re a brain worker like me, when you heard the news about how smart AI was getting, you may have felt some trepidation. After all, one of our team member’s sole jobs is to write grants for a living. As news that robots were taking over creative jobs grew, my heartburn rose steadily. Would I need to rethink our business? Could it really replace our creative team members?
For a few weeks of this Robot Apocalypse news cycle, I felt anxious about the future of our work. But then, I tried generative AI for the first time and I’m not nervous anymore.
A technological glitch caused me to be behind a deadline I needed to hit. A family member joked, “Just have AI write it!” A shiver crawled down my spine. Would that even be possible? More as a distraction than an actual effort, I asked Chat GPT to help me write a goals section for a grant application and what it offered to me was essentially a plain scoop of stale vanilla ice cream. I won’t knock a scoop of vanilla if I was in a dessert fix, but what funders want for an evaluation section is an entire brownie sundae, made with one scoop of cookie dough and one scoop of cookies and cream, with three toppings, and assembled in a no-nut facility. The writing was professional, dry, clean, and … vapid. Empty.
It was like walking into an empty, clean apartment for the first time. Yes, there’s a fridge and stove and tiles and ceiling lights, but everything feels missing. That cavernous emptiness comes from the lack of creativity and heart, shared by human beings who care deeply about this work. Without someone sharing that vitality, there isn’t true development writing.
Generative AI will only get better because it is designed to learn and change as it has more data. It is making educated guesses based on its source material. The more grants it can access, the more it will learn. Today, it may be useful for things like re-writing material into certain character limitations or creating a base into which you may smash better material. But ultimately, it’s no replacement for the human heart.
Perhaps the best example I can share is this picture. I asked AI image maker Gencraft to create a picture of a ninja writing a grant for this article. Why ninjas? Because the CLCC team of writers is pretty badass! What did I get? Well, it offered a pretty convincing ninja if you aren’t bought into the idea that ninjas generally have five fingers with zero claws and if you believe swords can be used to write. That’s the thing about AI: it’s surprising that it can do what it can do, but it's still just guessing.
