For quite a while now, we have been living with the letters ”A” and ”I” bombarding us from all angles. The use of AI has already become widespread in many different industries, and from the looks of it, we are only at the beginning.
I wanted to take some time and think about the use of AI specifically in writing. What does it mean for writing in general? Will AI replace some human writing, and if yes to what capacity? Will that be good or bad? What about writing in schools and universities? Scientific papers? Will we at some point read very good fiction written by a computer? Those are some questions I will try to answer for myself and for you, good human reader. How do I know you are human? Well, because you can select all the squares with bicycles of course!
Surely this topic has been covered in numerous articles and Reddit posts, but I wanted to give my take anyway as someone who works in an industry where AI is quite enforced, albeit in more technical aspects.
Why do We Even Write?
Why do humans even write? The obvious answer is to preserve and spread knowledge, ideas, and information in general. The importance of writing simply cannot be overstated. It is widely accepted that with the invention of writing came also the first civilizations that we know of. The first uses were practical and driven by necessity (as it often is the case) for record keeping, trade, and administration. It enabled us to organize ourselves in a more complex and structured way, which in turn enabled further development of society.
Writing is such a natural extension to some things that are at the core of what it means to be human: having ideas, emotions, abstract concepts, and being able to communicate them. We are storytelling beings. By storytelling I do not only mean fairy tales, although this is an excellent way of transferring knowledge and deep insights. I also mean all other forms of symbols. A traffic sign tells you a story, what you should or shouldn’t do, a rule to follow so you and others can travel safely. A Lego instruction book tells you a story of how to assemble those pieces of plastic into something recognizable. A music sheet tells you the story of what to do with an instrument to produce a beautiful song. A mathematical equation tells a story of a fundamental law of nature. It is often said that mathematics is the language in which the Universe is written. I love that.
So this is how we operate, we have ideas in our minds that we want to save and spread around. In this process we figured out writing.
The Evolution of Writing
From stone blocks to computer screens, the evolution of writing is a topic that I think deserves its own article (maybe one day!). For now I just wanted to look at it from a point of effort needed to write something.
Writing a large amount of text has always been a challenging undertaking. From carving something into clay, to papyrus, to medieval priest writing whole bibles in calligraphy by hand. That is a tremendous amount of work, which just piles up with each mistake made. With the advent of typewriters, and later computers, the process became much easier and smoother. Today almost everyone in the developed world has a computer and the ability to write with such elegance that people not too long ago could only dream of.
Even though it is physically much easier to write now than it was before, it still stays mentally demanding. The act of writing requires you to be focused, creative, disciplined. Writing a long novel often means months or years of writing, re-reading, and editing. Writing a good engineering or scientific work requires you to carefully plan how to present the information in a clear and concise way for the best possible understanding.
So writing anything meaningful and original has always been hard work. And then…
And Then Came AI
Now we come to the advent of AI. First I would like to mention that I think AI as we have it today is not some grand new invention that popped out of nowhere. For decades we had computers that you could play chess against. The computer would learn with every game, adapt, and use its analytics against you in the next game. Is this not AI?
In the last years it really spread into everyday use, specifically schools and workplaces, and got a lot of media attention. We started to use it for creating texts, so the very people who are writing the news got heavily affected, probably adding to the interest.
Should we just accept AI then or dismiss it for now? Like almost everything, it heavily depends on the specifics. Computers and AI are tools we created and it’s up to us to make the best use of them. Continuing on the topic of effort, AI provides some incredible opportunities to make writing more efficient. Today you can get a good amount of text in seconds. No more do you need to grind or even copy paste from Wikipedia for a school essay, AI can do it for you. But is this a good thing?
I the intro I wrote that I wanted to think about this topic, and yet I am writing about it. That sentence was intentional. You probably didn’t think much of it, you know what I meant. Because thinking and writing are virtually the same thing. So I think the question is: are we ready to give up thinking?
Giving Up Thinking
That to me seems to be the greatest challenge and negative aspect of AI in writing. Kids in schools are starting to use AI for generating homework now from an early age. Same thing in universities. By using AI for those assignments kids are working against themselves without knowing it. Here I am specifically talking about essays. The sheer act of writing them is orders of magnitude more important than how the essay looks like at the end. Yes the content is important, but in the process of writing we learn how to think, which is the single most important skill you can learn in society. Whatever you are doing in life, being able to clearly express your thoughts is invaluable.
I believe the school system was not ready for such a paradigm shift, and lots of teaching methods used up to now will have to go through a major rework to remedy the situation. AI is here and is not going anywhere anytime soon, so it’s up to us to rework the school system and make the time spent in schools really count.
Moving from school to businesses and writing in professional fields, the big danger is using AI generated text in technical topics by people who may not be experts in a given field. Often you can see managers that moved from operational work years ago, and now they want to quickly sum up some topic, and AI generates some nice bullet points very quickly. Yes it is quick, but especially in fields where precision of language is key, well…precision is key. Everything that comes out of AI needs to be checked with a critical mind.
I am curious about the use of AI in scientific papers. Science topics can be rather obscure, especially those at the frontier. Will AI help make things clearer or will it provide an easy way to publish flawed work? I can imagine it will get ever more easy to generate a bunch of complicated diagrams and accompanying text that can ‘modify’ some real research. Maybe we will create an AI for checking AI?
What about AI in creative writing like fiction?
Do Computers Have a Soul?
Think of all the atoms and molecules that make you you. In each atom a bunch of quantum effects, in each cell processes that keep us alive, everything working in harmony and somehow giving rise to consciousness. We still don’t know what exactly consciousness is or how it works. But somehow it came to be and we started our journey of thinking and writing.
We are trying to find our place in the world, we are feeling emotions we often can’t understand, we are living our story. And sometimes, some of us feel the urge and need to write something about that. It can be a made up story with made up characters in a made up world, but it can be the most real thing you every see. Books can abstract ideas, and transfer to us readers universal truths of life: wisdom, love, pain, grief, regret. That’s what good fiction does. It is a skill to write in that way. Some learn it really well, some are born talents. The masters of the craft are the authors we love to read, generation after generation. There is just something deep about those classics, that’s why they are classics.
I believe we are still far away from a computer matching that. Sure, you can feed all the books ever written into a computer and AI can generate some story using different elements from all of them. It may even be a decent story. But can a computer truly ever know what is going on inside us, when even we don’t know what consciousness is? Can a computer write something like Crime and Punishment? It would probably write Crime and call it a day. You could say that AI could understand why there was a Punishment and try to recreate something like that. Maybe, but can it truly feel a soul divided in half?
Can I see AI writing decent or even very good stories in the future? Yes, maybe. But true masterpieces, stories that touch your soul? I think that can come out only from a human heart.
Embracing the Inevitable
Looking now at the future, AI generated text can also be very positive and helpful. If you have to quickly arrange some slides and write a few sentences, yes AI can make it faster, smoother and maybe more professional. Those are circumstances where it’s maybe not so important to make absolutely everything manually from scratch. Once you make sure you know the rules and understand the topic, I think you are ready to decide when you can break the rules.
A good example that comes to mind is writing technical manuals. Those are situations where AI is really useful as everything needs to be very precise and written as instructions. I find it difficult to imagine someone really enjoys writing low level sets of instructions like click here and here to get that and that in some software. Maybe someone does – good for them!
There are many other positive aspects that can help make writing easier and more accessible, like enhanced grammar checks, alternative word suggestions, checking of previously written facts so you don’t have continuity errors etc. Maybe AI can generate short stories and be a good benchmark how not to write a story?
Conclusion
So there we have it, a quick take on AI in writing. It is an exciting era for sure, and time will tell how all of it will unfold. At the end of the day it is a new technology we invented, now we have the responsibility to make the best use of it.
Good competition is always healthy. If AI manages to write good books, then we will have to try even harder to write great ones!
What do you think about the use of AI in writing?