Why AI will not replace writers, a manifesto
Humans developed writing to exchange ideas. It is a form of communication. Ideas, concepts, stories, and experiences flow from one human to another, or to many.
The written words are the medium. Their purpose to convey meaning from one human to the next. The words themselves help fulfil this purpose, but what interests us is on either sides of the words: the lived experience of another human being, and our reaction to it.
We do not read for the words. We read, hopefully, to attempt to enlarge our circle of empathy. To spend time walking through different lives. These lives happened. They were not generated by a prompt but part of the human experience.
Humans crave connection, and our progress, or rather our technological progress, has often promised to enhance that connection while attempting to monetize it for private gains.
The new wave of AI follows this natural direction that capitalism has taken. Capitalism works by taking human activities and needs, and having them being conducted through transactions.
For example, we used to have family members look after our children, and we now have daycare centres. We may have gotten water from the well, but we now have bottled water. The more areas of our lives enter capitalism, the more growth is generated.
In recent years capitalism through Silicon Valley found growth by bringing into its remit areas of life that were not previously monetised: a couch at home for AirB&B, a car only used for commuting for Uber.
It made complete and logical sense. The more aspects of life is exchanged through financial transactions, the more money generated. It's efficient and it grows the economy.
Now, AI is taking this long financial colonization of all aspects of human life a step further: by inserting itself in our thoughts and feelings. Humans have a lot of thoughts and feelings, and to have a paid intermediary, a tollbooth at our synapses, has incredible potential for growth.
Imagine if every word written was produced by Claude. If every feeling was discussed with ChatGPT. If every argument was mitigated by Grok (okay, maybe not you Grok).
You'd have a fantastic system whereby a tool inserted itself from one human having a feeling to another human hearing about it. Forget about Musk's chips for brains, this is even less costly, as no hardware or surgeries are required.
AI is capitalism climbing the pyramid of Maslow. It got water and food under control. It helped us move around. Now is time for where the action truly happens: the crux of the human experience.
There are two key issues however, and I believe they are at the heart of why there's so much pushback against this very specific use case of AI; AI as a filter to the human experience.
The first issue is that AI is a lie. It is trickery. It doesn't represent real emotions and feelings. It simply generates something believable. If humans value being genuine, having heart-to-heart conversations, and feeling seen by others, this is an issue.
The second issue is the focus on outcomes. AI comes from people with the highest efficiency bias in the world: the tech people of Silicon Valley. There, everything is judged by outcomes, by the end goal, by what's produced.
This is why Sam Altman does not understand the backlash over asking ChatGPT to create and read stories to his child in the car. The outcome "read story to child" has been fulfilled. What's wrong with you people?
What is wrong is that human relationship is a process. It is not an outcome. You do not reach friendship, you sustain it. It is also a messy process, unedited, with tough lessons along the way. Sometimes you do not know what to say, sometimes you wish you could take back something, and that's just how it works.
C. Thi Nguyen makes the point of the process against the outcome eloquently in his book, The Score:
“If the point of art is to maximize productivity—to make lots of art quickly and cheaply—then algorithmic art is a good shortcut. But if you thought that the point of art was the exercise of human creativity, then algorithmic art is a disaster. If the point of art is to be engaged in the activity of making it and appreciating it—if the point of art is to be buried in the process, to be doing it yourself, using your own emotions and invention and sensitivity to fine-tune every detail-then algorithmic art is cheating. And not cheating in some boring, legalistic sense but cheating in the cosmic sense. By using algorithmic art-generation tools, we are cheating ourselves out of one of the most precious activities we have left.”
The point of writing isn’t the have words on a screen. The point of a relationship isn’t to have a marriage certificate on the wall. If this is what we believe, we’re cheating ourselves of the true value of writing and of relationships.
Unfortunately, it is our outwardly focus on an outcome and its concreteness (written words we can look at against feeling we experience) that pushes us towards a shallow understanding of what truly matters.
Callum Cant and James Muldoon also makes this point eloquently in their book, Feeding the Machine:
"Art is more than the ability to paint a pretty picture; it helps us understand ourselves and our place in the world. It is a form of self-expression that allows those around us to access our thoughts and feelings through an external form. The urge to define ourselves through creative works and to share these with others is part of what it means to be human. Some artists describe their work as a journey of self-discovery and a way of actualising themselves in the world."
If our focus is only on the outcome, we rob ourselves of this process. It can be as simple as asking AI to create a summary for us. Summaries cut us from interacting with the text. They remove thoughts that may have been triggered. They decide for us on what’s important, what should make it into the summary. They reduce our reading experience to a shallow outcome: a set of key points.
What we value is the messy process. This is where the human experience happens. And it is where AI cannot be found.
Because AI never experienced grief. AI never went through a break-up. AI never sat by a hospital bed holding somebody’s hand. AI hasn’t made mistake it regrets. AI wouldn’t know how an epiphany feels.
What AI can do is lie on all of these. It can replace the true accounts of messy human experience with a prompted smokescreen. Because after all, we know that what matters is to hear the words “my condolences”, “I believe you can do it”, “you will get it next time”, rather than the actual feelings that sit behind these words.
Writing isn’t words on a page. Writing is practising the human experience. Writing is a social glue we created to build relationships, communities. Writing helps us know that someone else has been there, that we’re not alone in our experience. That we’re heard and seen. Writing is also selfishly important for the writer, for them to go through the process, to struggle against the answer, to craft a beautiful sentence.
AI will not replace writers. Because writers are not in the business of printed words. They’re in the business of unpacking the human experience, of sharing feelings, of recounting aspects of the true physical lives that connect all of us.
