Writing is an apparently simple act. The person doing the writing puts words in order, one after another, line by line, adding squiggles and dots here and there to make the appropriate pauses before concluding with a mighty flourish: I am a writer, says the person who has written. And that is correct by definition.
But in our topsy-turvy zeitgeist, the writing on the wall is that artificial intelligence can not only write things but write them so convincingly that many readers often confuse its output with that of an actual human being, a real human writer. At the very least, that style of writing is more than good enough for the vast majority of commercial purposes.
If we assume for a moment that AI can usually convince readers of its humanness, then why can’t it be flawlessly human in a live conversation? What makes writing, for that matter, different from speech? The simplest and most obvious answer would be that human speech is much more complex and multifaceted than writing, especially when bound up in the dynamic give-and-take of conversation. It is easy enough to conclude that writing, a much simpler form of human dialogue by comparison, sets the bar much lower for AI imitation.
But that is only a matter of comparison, and I would argue that writing is an undeniable product of its more complex progenitor and—at least in its more refined expressions—never entirely sheds its influence. So while basic, unadorned writing is simple enough to be cheaply reproduced and undercut by AI, writing in a more substantial sense is ultimately a simulacrum of a human conversation, an active dialogue with a reader who should be able to discern the voice of a human writer palpable and vibrant beneath the words on the page. That is the value of human writing: that it has a personality and character—a voice with the nuance and subtlety of a thinking and feeling intelligence.
See what I did there? Why did I just write “thinking and feeling intelligence” instead of just “intelligence”? And why did I completely remove the subject pronoun from the first question two sentences ago? Why am I even asking these questions now? The answer is that my style and way of thinking is something already embedded in my own peculiar approach to the topic of human writing.
These are choices that I made intuitively in the process of writing to communicate a particular message for a specific medium—in this case, a blog. They are writing choices that took that exact form and appeared at that exact point in my dialogue. And like the dialogue, the specific choices are my own; they are all inseparable from my character as a writer and human being because they come from my own thought process, sensibility, and active intelligence as it engages with the subject at hand.
From this perspective, I am my writing; my character as a person is never for a moment separable from what I produce on paper, however pared down the writing is in comparison with the idiosyncrasies of my speech. In consequence, what people get when they read or collaborate with a human writer—what anyone gets out of a writer worth their salt—is the entirety of that writer’s character, who they are as manifested in the range of their writing abilities.
So while AI can produce a convincing amalgam of humanness, it is never more than that: an amalgam, and usually one with a certain lifeless quality because it is devoid of human feeling. By contrast, every human writer has a unique cognitive economy, which amounts to a range of abilities based on experience, education, and character. As writers, translators, or editors, we are responsible for defining and marketing ourselves with all our unique value and for understanding the difference between that value and that of a derivative and uncreative AI.
That human value, of course, reaches far beyond its commercial utility, and humanity will need art and creativity long after everything artificial makes even the most complex kind of human work completely superfluous. There is plenty of freedom in that kind of realization, and I’ve at last come around to a statement awfully similar to one made by the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche in Ecce Homo, written not long before his fabled collapse in Turin: this is who I am. Please don’t mistake me for someone (or something) else.
