The AI Invasion: For Humans, It’s Becoming Harder to Write

As I opened this file to begin writing, the following message greeted me: “Select an icon or press Alt + i to draft with Copilot.” Meanwhile, Gemini is on standby in my email program, offering to help me write missives or suggesting optimal answers to emails (“Sounds great!” “Of course!” “Let me get back to you!”). As for Google searches, the top result for anything one attempts to find now is AI-generated, which gives me a new appreciation for the encyclopedias and dictionaries of all sorts that take up space on our shelves. Recently, a Roman literature scholar I know looked up Cicero’s Brutus, searching for a title of an academic article about it. In response, Google helpfully invented a new Roman tragedy on the subject: “Brutus is a serious Roman historical drama, or fabula praetexta.” Another academic friend is contemplating breaking her contract with an academic press that is newly allowing AI to be trained on the content of its books.

No question about it: For writers like me, who would like nothing more than to do our own writing and thinking with dignity and intellectual honesty, it’s becoming harder to write—at least on a computer.

I confess, when I first read Wendell Berry’s prophetic manifesto on the subject, “Why I Am not Going to Buy a Computer,” I was not convinced. Such is the fate of all prophets—others reject their predictions until too late. Berry, after all, considers not only computers but several modern technologies in this reflection on how to write. For instance, he prefers writing in the daytime hours to save electricity. Meanwhile I write almost exclusively at night, when my husband and children are asleep.

My handwriting, furthermore, has always been atrocious. “Just look how she writes,” my outraged first-grade teacher back in Russia exclaimed to my mother, after summoning her to a parent-teacher conference for this purpose alone. My English handwriting repeatedly received similar “accolades,” once I began writing in this noble tongue in high school. And so, unlike Berry, I have had good reason to think that I really could write better on a computer than on paper, with a pen or a pencil. At least this way, I and others can read the products of my work. Only for copy work or short notes that no one else will need to read do I handwrite.

More important, since my college days, there has been no real alternative—unless, perhaps, one were to resurrect the good old typewriter, a machine I have never had the privilege of using. After all, all paper assignments, with their increasing length, up to the doctoral dissertation, have had to be submitted in print, not in handwriting. Also, I have found the process of typing much faster; it is far more efficient than handwriting. And Berry himself, as he readily admits, has had to rely on another person to type all of his handwritten work for publication—in his case, the kind typist (and initial editor) has been his wife Tanya. Most of us, however, do not have the luxury of employing a typist. Really, the entire educational system, by the time I went off to college in the fall of 1999, has been built with computers in mind for typing all assignments.

And yet my present disquietude is not with the computers of 1999, with their lovely floppy discs that my dad so kindly got me to go with my giant old desktop computer when I went off to college. Those machines, in retrospect, worked much more like the typewriters of old than the computers of today. They certainly didn’t try to talk to you or give creative suggestions. They could barely handle spell-checking.

Rather, my concern is with the idea of outsourcing my creative work, delegating the idea-making and wordsmithing to a machine instead of tinkering on my own with the minutiae of a process that gives me an inordinate degree of delight. If writing were merely a utilitarian task of setting words down to paper only to fulfill the length requirements of particular assignments, perhaps delegating some writing to machines might make sense. Although maybe not even that. When Amazon peddled an AI-authored book on foraging mushrooms last year, it turned out to be a deadly product. But if writing today still is, as it has been for millennia, a task of rendering in words something remarkable, transcendent, utterly beautiful, a way of sharing some facet of reality with other persons—all things people longed to do with words before writing existed!—then something else is afoot. And this something is a function AI could never replace or replicate.

Consider the Homeric epics. Sometime around the eighth century BC, traveling bards in the Greek-speaking world began weaving together stories and episodes that eventually became The Iliad and The Odyssey, combining intricate poetic formulae into a remarkably difficult poetic meter, the dactylic hexameter. With its mix of dactyls (long syllable followed by two shorts) and spondees (two long syllables), six of these units to a verse, the meter ruled out certain words and word combinations. But poets came up with creative solutions, as poets are wont to do.

Homeric Greek is a combination of regional dialects that was never spoken in any one place and time. It is, put simply, the language of poetry, creativity, necessity—and most of all, the language of beauty that touches heart and soul, transforming the hearer or reader forever by mere words. The epic language is testament to the artistic genius that poets and other kinds of wordsmiths have had to resort to for the sake of their craft. And as all unique innovations, it is the sort of thing that no program trained on past output—no matter how extensive—could come up with on its own.

It also has always been remarkably slow work, unlike the instantaneous results that AI offers in response to a few words in a prompt. The Roman poet Vergil was reported to have written no more than two verses a day. Composing The Aeneid, his final work and masterpiece, he wrote just one verse a day. Becoming a better writer, a more competent poet, led Vergil to slow down, not speed up. I think about this a lot, as I admittedly do too much too fast, including my writing.

It is a stark contrast—the civilization-shaping epic versus a deadly wrong mushroom-foraging guide. But it is a fitting contrast for what the two approaches to writing can deliver.

In the meanwhile, send me tips: I’m looking for the flip-phone equivalent of a Word processor.

Image Via: Flickr