AI is going to making writing redundant? I don’t think so…
I’ve read lots of articles about how AI and language learning models are going to make the role of the writer redundant. There’s a perspective I haven’t come across in the coverage though and, when it comes to writing, it’s the most important one of all.
I’ve been a writer for twenty years. I’ve written lots of books, and had my small share of fame and fortune, but the thing I’ve learned about writing is that, in the end, writing is something you do for its own sake.
I always feel slightly sick when I’ve finished writing a book. When I’m writing it, it feels alive because it’s not yet fixed. When it’s finished it’s like a kind of creative death. As if I’ve put a pin in the possibilities that once existed and have now stuck the work, unmoving, to a wall.
Exploring those creative possibilities — the process of writing rather than the outcome itself — changes how you think. It changes what you know. It changes what you are curious to find out about. It changes your perspective on — and experience of — the world.
Sadly, lots of people now think anything worth doing is only valuable once you’ve pinned it to a wall which, when it comes to writing, is what AI and machine learning are offering to do for you. But this misses the point of writing, nay life, itself.
The process of writing creates meaning in your life because meaning is relational. It’s what happens in the space between people, objectives and things.
I spent twelve years running a publishing business and the objective was not to leave, which I did in the end. The objective was to do it. To make the idea real and live in the creation of it authentically with all the amazing people who helped make it happen and shared the same purpose. The point of starting a business is not the exit. It’s how you do it and how it changes you.
Of course the wider issue here is that life is not outcome dependent either. As Amanda Blainey, author of Do Death, put it so memorably in her Do Lecture a few years ago, ‘death has a 100% success rate’. What matters is what happens between your birth and death. Not many of us see the objective of our lives as being to die, even though so many of us live as though we do.
So don’t mourn the purpose and meaning of writing just yet. As long as people are curious about themselves, and the world, and they use writing as a way to express that, they will be doing something AI and Machine Learning can never do. Live.
