I have loved writing for as long as I can remember. Once I started, I couldn’t stop. The opportunity to combine words to create new worlds, conversations, questions, debates, and yes, arguments. Many writers are afraid, and some are also angry at the volume of AI writing now flooding our lives. But the genie is out of the bottle, and there is no stuffing it back in.
I am sure you remember the countless horror movies where characters wished to be rich and then their parents were killed in a plane crash and they inherited their wealth? We are inevitably going to have to deal with the unintended consequences of what we have brought to life, as we have always had to.
AI is clearly good for generating institutional reports, action plans, strategy and vision documents. You know, documents composed quickly and over flowing with repetitive jargon and rhetoric that few people ever read or implement. Of course, the function of these was never to change anything but to solidify the status quo under a tide of pretence. Perhaps AI is making this more apparent, and this pointless work will disappear. Oh my!
But if you are a writer and you have been using AI, you know that AI does not yet experience the world and therefore it doesn’t understand experience. I am sure this will change with time as all things do, but I find myself constantly arguing with AI when writing, and that’s not a bad thing. Due to the extensive analytics that are now part of our daily reality, we expect that AI knows us, it knows our habits, what we think and feel, it listens to us.
But does it really?
We continue to learn and grow every day, and it shapes who we are. In other words, we are not who we were yesterday today, and we won’t be who we are today, tomorrow. Our lives are influenced by unpredictable experiences that fundamentally change us.
For me, AI is not yet at the stage where it can understand this. However, I have found arguing with AI to be useful. Knowing what you don’t want to say can help clarify what you do want to say. It doesn’t reduce the time it takes to write (unless you are producing an institutional ‘vision’ document), but it does allow you to iterate more quickly.
Yes, there are times when it is so far off track from what I am trying to get at that I give up, but I often come back to where it has gone wrong to unpack what I am trying to get to the heart of.
The best writing for me, whether fiction or non-fiction, comes from real human experience – messy, unpredictable, and never fixed. And this is where AI gets it wrong. It simply can’t predict the course of human experience in all its beauty, and all its pain.
So next time you are feeling down because an AI system has not understood your unique experience as a human being, know that it can’t — and that’s not your fault. Actually it’s your strength, as we are all shaped everyday by our experiences, some shared, and some intimately personal, and this is what I want to read about.
