The bot ate my essay: how AI undermines writing

The age of AI is upon us, but how will students learn to write when a machine can now do it for them?

Robot's won't ever write as well as humans. But gee, they come close.

In the years since I retired from teaching, technology has made greater and greater inroads into education, most recently in the form of large language models.

ChatGPT and other bots are ubiquitous, giving a whole new meaning to botulism.

John Warner, in his More Than Words: How to Think About Writing in the Age of AI, sums up its advocates’ bold promise: “There is something better out there! We can finally be liberated from the frustrating limits of the human mind!”

Warner expresses his dubiety about artificial intelligence early in his book. He goes on to ask if it is possible that AI “is not genuinely solving a problem but is instead being used to paper over a problem in a way that will cause significantly worse problems down the line”.

More Than Words: How To Think About Writing in the Age of AI By John Warner.

The problem, specifically, in this case is the inability of students to write well and read with intelligence and imagination.

As Warner notes, in our digital age “the challenges of concentrating on text are undermined by a culture where we are expected to spend much more time skimming and assimilating significant volumes of information than we are deeply considering the ideas and concepts in those texts”.

Warner has been a teacher of writing at the college level and is the author of other books on writing, among them Why They Can’t Write and The Writer’s Practice. In this book, he takes on the effect of AI on student writing – an effect he finds a good deal less than salubrious.

He sets out all the claims for AI made by its exponents, many of them extravagant – it is “the greatest technology humanity has yet developed”, according to Sam Altman, the OpenAI co-founder who stands to greatly benefit from it – and describes how others think it will doom humanity. “I have no clue how to evaluate the ultimate probabilities of these future scenarios,” Warner writes, “and because of this, extinction by AI is not a problem I’m particularly interested in thinking or writing about. Frankly, all these people seem kind of nuts.”

What does interest him is the effect of AI on student writing. A composition rendered by AI is certain to be grammatically and otherwise formally correct, lacking only in originality and an interesting point of view. Machines, Warner holds, cannot teach writing. “Only humans can read. Only humans can write. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.”

For Warner, writing is an act of discovery, thinking made manifest on the page. “How do I know what I think until I see what I say?” EM Forster remarked.

Warner quotes Thomas Mann on the difficulty of writing for true writers: “A writer is a person for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.” Writing and thinking, in this view, may seem conterminous, but writing is also a way of expressing feeling. “Making sense of the world is the work of writing,” Warner writes.

In a chapter titled My Digital Doppelganger, he put his own writing to the AI test, asking a model to create, in his own style, a piece on film critics Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert. He describes feeling “like I’m reading a Stepford version of myself, that says things that are sort of how I might say them, but where the slight resemblance is actually the creepiest part”.

Warner felt the work produced by AI “schmaltzy”. He adds: “But knowing the text was generated by a machine genuinely creeped me out.”

The author allows that AI may well produce writing that “puts it ahead of what most students can produce”, at least at the level of correctness, but he contends that it isn’t really writing that emerges. He goes on to claim that AI is more likely to set the true learning of writing back, that in it we have an application that “can produce ‘bulls...’ on demand”.

Perhaps, though, this availability of text on demand “is the kick in the ass we need to rethink our approaches” to the teaching of writing.

Unlike other arts (music, drawing, dance) writing is not something one is born with a propensity for or that comes easily – a gift, if you please, of the gods.

There are no great child prodigies, no Mozarts, no Raphaels, in literature. Joseph Conrad was pushing 40 when he published his first novel. One trains to become a writer, and that training is chiefly through reading great writers. Every writer is a serious reader. Writers, moreover, read differently than other people. Along with reading out of general interest, for aesthetic appreciation or to compare one book with others in the same line, writers read in the hope of discovering things they can use to put to a novel use in their own writing. To adapt a phrase: AIs copy, artists steal.

As kids learn how to play basketball from watching bigger kids, so do would-be writers learn how the literary game is best played from older, established writers. I learned not in the classroom but from reading how to use the dash, when the placement of a semicolon is appropriate, how to end a paragraph, and more.

A quibble: throughout the book, he splits more infinitives than Abraham Lincoln split logs. Is a writer of books on writing permitted such literary slovenliness? Are there many people left on the planet who still notice?

I hope so; in an age of instantly produced language, the time writers take to perfect their prose seems all the more important.

None of the defects in More Than Words makes it less compelling. Warner notes that even more technology is on the way that aims to make student writing easier, and he acknowledges that his own view of this technology is that of an unapologetic Luddite, a fraternity against the advance of machinery in which I, for one, join him.

In learning how to write well, nothing can replace thoughtful reading, careful practice and an interesting point of view.

Anything else is artificial all right, but a good deal less than intelligent.

- WSJ