“I Write To Find Out What I Am Thinking”
Joan Didion
It’s all the talk these days. Would you use AI in your writing? How would you use it? Why would you use it?
Some excuse their use of it, saying that with re-writing, the finished product still is their own. I’m not so sure. There’s a very slippery slope here.
When you substitute another’s “thinking” for your own, at any stage, you are not thinking. Whether it’s a “helpful” parent who writes their child’s homework essay for them, to help them along, or a “helpful” AI that researches and maybe drafts early versions, the “writer” is not engaging their own thinking.
The young people in my life, young adults who make their livings writing computer code, they know so much more than me about these new technologies, tell me that Artificial Intelligence is not intelligent. It regurgitates.
They also tell me there already is research showing that when you don’t do your own thinking, your thinking abilities decline. Unused “equipment” gets repurposed. You weren’t wearing that old shirt anymore, so when you weren’t looking it was cut up for cleaning rags.
Building brain “wiring”, maintaining and creating the synapses that keep you “cooking with gas” in the thinking department, requires work. Your brain must work to stay strong, and when you outsource that work your brain grows weaker.
Whether the skill you want to maintain is thinking – remembering details, wrestling with contradictions, making connections, and generating new ideas – or something like playing the piano, you must use it, or lose it.
Late in her life, my mother-in-law, Mary, told me that she once was an accomplished piano player, confident that her skill was permanent. And so she neglected to practice, assuming it would be there when she returned. But eventually, when she tried, it was not there, not like before. It made her sad.
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A few years ago, I was taking classes at the same small college where my young-adult sons attended. Fortunately for them we have different last names, so my classmates, who also were my sons’ classmates, did not realize the connection, which might have been embarrassing.
Although I was an adult, already with university degrees, my experience as a student in those classes, surrounded by young undergraduate students, felt very like my long-ago undergrad experiences. Just like my classmates I found some of the reading tedious, seemingly irrelevant to the courses, leading to frustrated rantings. Why was this assigned?
I also experienced the age-old resentment at the assigned essay. We had read a book, touching on it lightly in class, and now an essay was needed. It was an important essay as it would be a third of our final grade. I surprised myself by the intensity of my reaction to the assignment: I complained and lamented to my family members that it was a stupid assignment. What a waste of time. I really don’t want to do it. I’ve read the book. Isn’t that enough?
Finally, the evening before it was due, I had no other choice – failing was not an option – I began. After drafting an opening paragraph or two, new ideas started coming to mind. Connections I had not seen before materialized from nowhere. I picked up steam. I was on a roll. I wrote an essay full of new thoughts and arguments that had never before occurred to me, until I started to write.
One of those new thoughts was the question: is this why they assign essays?
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Writing makes you think. The act of writing, organizing thoughts into words, sparked new thoughts, new ideas, new connections, where previously I’d had none. What a delicious, thrilling experience!
It was the juxtaposition of this new feeling against the resentment I’d felt only an hour before that was so striking to me. Why was I so late learning this?
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The thrill I feel as I write something new – as I struggle and wrestle with amorphous ideas and begin to see coherent thoughts and ideas take shape – I would never outsource.
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Photo: E.M. Forster’s science fiction short story “The Machine Stops” (1909) begins on Page 1 of his story collection “The Eternal Moment” (1928).
Great piece Ann, and this AI thing and writing is a topic I am keenly interested in. I have not met one person who thinks AI writing is real writing, and as a bookseller, I am wondering how do any of us know if writers are using AI? I am not interested in reading, let alone recommending books with AI-generated content. But how would I know? It seems that publishers need to find a way to convey this to the buyer. Or make it a contract issue with the author. The thing is, all this AI is trained on real writer’s writing, and they are not getting credit for it!
Thanks Julia. This was prompted by learning of software that can be used to rate a piece as human written, AI written, or a mixture. (The accuracy of the software was not discussed). I thought it a good time to declare myself an AI-free writer. I expect others have done the same, or will. It surprises me when the question is raised. It makes me think of the professor in Rhode Island who asked his class (or the subset of his class who intended to use AI for their assignments) why they were even bothering with university. Exactly that, is my question, when someone in my creative writing circles asks tentatively about using AI: why be a writer? The Authors Guild has a certificate that book authors can use: https://authorsguild.org/human-authored/ Thanks again Julia. In solidarity, Ann