The idea of AI-assisted writing is absolutely terrifying to me

• June 20, 2023
• shorts  
• artificial intelligence  
• AI  
• writing  
• poetry  

The idea of AI-assisted writing is absolutely terrifying to me, not because I’m worried about the future of writing as a career – that has been slowly dying for decades anyway - but because writing is the process of figuring out what you actually think, and that is a skill that is slowly dying.

I found 1984 to be an extremely disturbing novel, because the premise involved slowly limiting the types of thoughts the populace was able to have by limiting their language. I can’t help but worry that we’re headed on a different, more insidious path to the same end result.

When ChatGPT presents you with a paragraph to edit, it may contain good ideas and it will probably be phrased pretty well. But while sure, maybe you might have come to similar conclusions eventually, they’re not your conclusions. You haven’t done the legwork to back them up to yourself. Sometimes I just have a fuzzy opinion. I often don’t put my finger on exactly why I have it until I write about it.

The problem with AI is that it comes from a worldview that deems process unimportant, when in reality, process is everything. Value doesn’t just come from superficial polish or professional appearance. Sure, polish is impressive, and can be an outward sign of competence. But what makes a text worth reading is the substance.

To me, writing a poem is the best example of process being key. It takes me weeks, months, sometimes years to get through a poem. It’s not actually because the form is more difficult for me, although that is a factor. It’s because of what I use the form to achieve. It’s the fact that I almost never go into a poem with a clear idea of what I’m trying to say. To me, the value in writing poems is being able to chip away at defining something fuzzy without boxing it into a rigid form of clarity. The value is in figuring out my own thoughts, and that part – the part where I live in confused areas of my brain for a while – that’s the part that takes forever. And once I get there, I’ve understood myself better. Having the poem at the end is just a bonus.

And I don’t know, I feel like with everything moving so quickly and having to get results all the time, the value in thinking things through is being forgotten.

Anyway. I feel like a boomer right now.