From Building to Moulding: How AI co-writing is changing prose
I am a big fan of generative AI. I’ve worked in programming for years, so the chance to offload some of the busy, annoying work to a magic robot that is roughly as useful as an intern is obviously appealing. And for programming, the system works. Because in programming, there is often a correct answer, and importantly, we can test it. When I get ChatGPT to write regex for me, or flesh out a function, I do not really care how elegantly it does it, as long as it works.
But when it comes to writing, I think the role of AI changes completely. Writing is not as black and white as programming. There is not a correct way to do it that can be tested and confirmed. Every word choice carries meaning.
Before generative AI, this was embedded into the writing process. I was typing, or, God forbid, handwriting things out, to the point where each word choice was a reflection of my mental process, even if I was not always conscious of that fact. My language was often imperfect, but it was still a reflection of my skills and my thoughts. I like to think of this as a point where I am constructing my text, like one would with Lego. Continuously adding, removing, shifting, but often only arriving at an approximation of my ideas when my ability with language failed me. And some people are exceptional with Lego, or language, and could construct something complex, but that was often the exception rather than the rule.
Even at an early point, though, we can see how AI alters this process. I am a notoriously bad speller, but would you be able to tell from most of my writing? No. Because I have always lived in an age where any mistake I made came with a little red squiggly line underneath it. In those cases, the AI helped me smooth out the edges of the sculpture. I could make small alterations here and there to better express my ideas, without really changing the content or the overall shape. At the time, I remember my parents lamenting the way spellcheck meant I never learned to spell properly, because for some reason the skill was treated almost as a moral virtue in our household, along with proper pronunciation, of course. But as a so-called digital native, I don’t think my poor spelling has ever really held me back.
So what of the newer fears around AI and writing? Will the next generation ultimately fail to communicate through text at all? I doubt it. I think a lot of people still assume that if a piece of writing is genuinely good, a human must have constructed it word by word, without acknowledging the way AI has played a role for the last 20 years.
I think the real sticking point now, and the same could be said for AI in music and art, is that the production of a “correct” text no longer indicates that much thought or effort went into it. Going back to my Lego example, writing with AI feels more like moulding clay. Within 30 seconds, you can get a rough shape. But it can still take a lot of time to produce something worthwhile. No longer does each word have to be thought out, each brick placed by hand. We can now make sweeping changes to prose with just a few words. “Shorten this.” “Change this to the active voice.” “Write me an abstract.” Just as one could with clay on a potter’s wheel.
But does this make for inherently worse writing? Maybe. It depends. When the outcome of a task is defined more by its existence than by its quality, then almost certainly. People under pressure to write more than a person realistically can will take shortcuts, like using AI to generate something based on an internal web search. And because we live in a society that rewards more stuff over better stuff, this is how we get the slop.
But when someone is setting out to make something carefully curated and sculpted, I cannot really see the harm. Putting messy notes into AI and generating a paragraph, or getting it to fix tone or grammar, assuming that the author goes back over it properly, does not seem like much more than a natural progression of spellcheck. The difference between using AI or not then becomes a question of medium. Lego or clay. Both can be used to make something great, and both can make something terrible.