A.I. Stands for Artificial Intelligence

I finally organized a few thoughts on A.I. and the writing life.

Maybe you’ve noticed: all the Big Tech companies are beefing up their platforms with new Artificial Intelligence features. I recently logged on to LinkedIn and noticed this prompt:

Try writing with AI. What might that mean? I can’t say, because writing with Artificial Intelligence remains a premium service on LinkedIn, of course! But it got me thinking about a fundamental tension between Artificial Intelligence and Human Writers, a tension that becomes apparent when we reflect on this simple question…

What Even Is Writing?

No, seriously, what is writing?

Put differently, what are you doing when you are writing? Many people, including many who teach writing, seem to think it is essentially the exercise of certain linguistic techniques to achieve some end: persuade, entertain, inform, etc. For them, writing is about skills. Learn the skills—a tasteful set of em-dashes, for example—and you learn to write, regardless of what you write about.

Writing-as-technique is certainly the dominant view in the business world, at least among the advertising copywriters I’ve worked among for the past five years. What passes for good copywriting often amounts to little more than the deployment of trade techniques, sometimes called “best practices,” that yield the greatest results relative to some marketing objective—including the word NEW in an email subject line, for instance, or addressing a customer’s “pain points” before offering your product as the solution.

It’s not hard to see how Artificial Intelligence could come in handy here. Trained on massive datasets, A.I. bots can quickly identify and replicate the selfsame copywriting techniques at the flick of a wrist. And insofar as we understand writing as technique, Artificial Intelligence could presumably come in handy with any form of wordsmithing—journalism, fiction, poetry—since every form of writing entails some specific techniques.

The trouble comes when we forget that writing entails more than technique, and this makes all the difference when deciding whether you should “try writing with A.I.”

Intellectual Issues

An older school of thought sees writing not as a bundle of skills, but as an activity of the human intellect. I recently encountered one instance of this view in a craft book on “classic prose style” called Clear and Simple as the Truth, by Francis-Noël Thomas and Mark Turner. For them, writing proceeds from thinking:

To achieve good prose style, writers must work through intellectual issues, not merely acquire mechanical techniques. Although it is true that an ordinary intellectual activity like writing must lead to skills, and that skills visibly mark the performance, the activity does not come from the skills, nor does it consist of using them.

Genuine writing originates in an active human mind, not the mere acquisition of skills. Working through “intellectual issues” sounds a bit cerebral, I know. Yet for Thomas and Turner writing must be so understood if we wish to uphold the written word as a vehicle for truth. Otherwise, language becomes the mere instrument of tyrants, sophists, and, yes, even copywriters.

Writing proceeds from thinking, and thinking is an activity (read: active). Writing is mental exercise. If you’ve ever been forced to write a college essay, you know this is true. Sure, some people may be more predisposed to this particular form of intellectual activity than others, just like some people are physically inclined toward, say, basketball. But this in no way changes the sort of activity that writing simply is.

I’ll Keep My Humanity, Thanks

So here’s the rub: when you ask Artificial Intelligence to write for you, you’re asking Artificial Intelligence to think for you.

This guy gets it.

Most of the A.I. chatter online has centered on outputs—whether bots can generate text or visuals that match or surpass the quality of human creativity. But this question is beside the main point. I don’t doubt ChatGPT 21.2 will one day wow us with sonnets that could make Shakespeare cry. Far more urgent is the question of what will become of humans if we give our brains to the bots.

Of course, writing is not the only form of thinking, but it’s one humans have relied on, existentially, for a long, long time. Who can say what outsourcing writing to Artificial Intelligence might mean for civilization or the very structure of human consciousness?

Over the centuries, we’ve built plenty of tools to make our lives easier and more efficient. As we become dependent on our tools, however, we often lose touch with the skills associated with older ways of getting things done. Some kids these days don’t know how to write in cursive (*gasp*) or make a call with a landline. And my gas lawn mower has not improved my dexterity with a scythe, but I’m not losing sleep over it. What gives?

Wielding a scythe is not a basic human behavior, but thinking is. As such, it stands with a number of other innate capacities by which humans flourish or fail to flourish. I borrow this language from a recent article by Tyler Harper over at The Atlantic. He argues that the overlooked danger of Artificial Intelligence is how it threatens to diminish essential human capacities to such an extent that we end up needing A.I. to teach us how to be human again:

What makes many applications of artificial intelligence so disturbing is that they don’t expand our mind’s capacity to think, but outsource it … In this case, technology diminishes us, and that diminishment may well become permanent if left unchecked. Over the long term, human beings in a world suffused with AI-enablers will likely prove less capable of engaging in fundamental human activities: analyzing ideas and communicating them, forging spontaneous connections with others, and the like.

I don’t know about you, but I’d sure like to prove capable of analyzing and communicating ideas, not to mention forging spontaneous connections with others. This, finally, is why I will not outsource my writing—my thinking—to Artificial Intelligence. Too much is at stake: our humanity.

It is easy for me to imagine that the next great division of the world will be between people who wish to live as creatures and people who wish to live as machines.

Wendell Berry, Life Is a Miracle