AI Text is NOT the Future of Writing
On the phenomenon of AI-generated text
Welcome to The Mind of Murphy, my digital garden for planting new ideas—and possibly also mental illnesses!
So the big buzz right now is AI generated text and its consequences. Mainly that it more or less commodifies the act of writing, “empowering” anyone to reach some minimum standard of quality.
Lots of writers are shitting their pants right now. The bots can write an entire essay in minutes when it takes few months. Yikes. Even if the essays or novels or whatever else don’t quite match the quality of a human crafted piece of writing, the sheer quantity gives AI and its users a competitive edge. Sadly, we live in a world of quantity and not quality.
I think there’s a lot of truth to this in the short term. But I feel less threatened by AI generated text when I zoom out and think about the long-term consequences.
For one, AI generated text makes you lazy. It isn’t just the manual process of coming up with sentences, it is a shortcut around thought itself. Writing is just an extension of thinking. It might feel like you are publishing more than ever, and had a higher quality, but sooner or later, your voice will become more quiet, and the voice of the AI will be the only thing you can hear. You will have muted your own thinking not just with words on the page, but in your mind. Your fucking mind! Because you’ll no longer be able to think, you’ll only know how to Ask ChatGPT to write a hot take on the latest Sabrina Carpenter drama, but you’ll be incapable of coming up with a hot take yourself.
And if all you do is write prompts to ChatGPT, someone with more time and energy will beat you at that game.
It is not a game worth playing.
So I think in many ways, the future of writing is going to be predicated on leaning into our own crazy little personal styles. Our quirks and idiosyncrasies as writers. As obsessive over-thinkers.
I cannot speak for everyone, but when I get hooked on a rider, I become almost obsessive about it. I absorb every word they’ve ever written, and think deeply about how their thought process got them to say such wonderful or important things. Being a faithful reader means internalizing the thoughts of your favorite writers.
I think that whether we consciously acknowledge it or not, this is what most of us writers do with our favorites.
And I cannot imagine a scenario where someone feels this way about AI generated text. Don’t get me wrong, it comes pretty close to the real thing here and there if you meticulously prompted the right way. But it cannot produce those results consistently. Not least because the person doing the prompting will be too lazy to know the difference anyway.
AI is a cynical shortcut to having a finished product. But it is not a replacement for great writing because it is not a replacement for thinking. Only you can think. That is your advantage. And I invite you, my friend, to do more of that.
If you enjoyed this silly little brain dump, you’ll like this slightly more polished essay a lot more:
I can't ride a horse. I can't grow food. I can't find food in the wild or shelter for that matter. I don't know if i can read a map anymore. I can't remember the route to various places i frequent. I can't travel any real distance under my own power. I can't repair clothes or footwear. I can't sharpen a knife. I can't make even basic tools or furniture.
But if i can still arrange words into some sort of coherent mass, within a few years i will feel like a master genius 😂