AI in Writing Is Like a Mighty Pen, Can a Pen Replace the Writer? What Is the Future of Writing?
Some public debate is about the future of writing with the advent of AI as a rival to human writers: is this a relevant issue?
Content is king in our era, and so it has always been.
Consequently, the dream of creating content automatically and gaining from it is an understandable desire, as artificial intelligence (AI) research is moving in that direction too.
Some human content creators worry about being replaced by a neural network soon. Others seek the help of AIs to create more and faster.
It deals with competition against and collaboration with AIs to create the king: content.
Instead, I state that content is a servant, like any way of creating it is. Purposes give meaning to content. Writing without sense is a losing game. Will AIs ever create intentions?
Purpose is king
Even writing content for the broadest possible audience — meaning with an almost undefined audience — requires a purpose.
Inform, convince, entertain: these are possible purposes in writing. The same is true for other kinds of content, but I focus on writing here.
Can an AI create a purpose and then content that fulfills it? That’s the point.
Try to google “Can artificial intelligence create purpose?”: you’ll find tons of articles about AI’s purpose, but I still need to find something about AI creating sense.
This situation is particularly relevant for writing.
AIs are a sort of automation. Automation is executing checklists. Regardless of how complicated it was to define them, AIs run lists of steps that mirror similar other lists given a context.
When AIs create writing content, they mirror similar content; by doing that, they may even invent something new. But the purpose of that writing is transparently and unconsciously inherited from the mirrored content, nothing more.
For example, when AIs create a novel, they inherit the purpose of entertaining readers from the many novels instructing the same AIs in the learning phase.
Instead, when human writers create a novel, they want to convey a message; their words express a purpose and not just a structure that mirrors many others.
Words declare purposes
For example, Sinem Günel describes the following year’s trends in her 10 Trends That Will Shape the Online Writing Industry in 2023 by showing how relevant the human facet of writing is.
Next to the AI presence in the writing business, she underlines that:
Quote: As competition grows, writers realize they need to collaborate instead of compete.
Collaboration is a typical purpose-based need. When starting to collaborate, you and others share an intent which is the aim of the collaboration itself.
Many writers who support each other to write are a sort of “human neural network” where a node of the network is a writer. In that sense, they mimic AIs’ structure. Amazing.
Unlike AI, each writer in a “human neural network” brings to the table purposeful words, not just words that imitate a facet of the unlimited Internet.
That’s the point: human words declare purposes. Collaboration among human writers makes a purpose.
In the same article, Sinem Günel notices that today:
Quote: We can’t write like it’s 2008, but we also can’t act like it’s 2050.
In 2050 and even 2100, words will reach and engage their audience as carriers of purpose. That will not change, as far as readers are human readers. That’s my forecast.
What is the future of purpose?
So, the original question about the future of writing becomes the question about the future of purpose in writing.
Quoting the Oxford Language, “purpose” is:
Quote: the reason for which something is done or created or for which something exists.
If we focus on the reason for which to write, the future cannot be AI.
Why?
AI is a computational box that is capable of elaborating an input like:
Quote: Write a short novel about a man who lost himself and, after a while, found love.
The result of the AI elaboration might be an excellent short novel, and it will be more and more impressive in the future. Nevertheless, the mechanism of input-elaboration-output makes AI nothing more than a mighty pen.
Like a pen, AI is a tool for writing.
Like a pen, AI does not need to write. So, it does not have any purpose in writing.
From a purpose standpoint, the reason for which we write is invariant. We write to mirror our thinking and discover something more about us in the world. That has been true since the first man wrote a sign on the cave wall.
Conclusion
The competition between AIs and human writers is not a relevant issue. It would be like a competition between a car and a driver: the car could even self-drive, but the driver knows why they need to reach a destination.
So, yes: AIs are the future of writing, as intelligent pens that increase and speed up the writers’ outcomes.
And no: AIs are not the future of writing, as they elaborate a text based on human senses and don’t need writing to mirror their thinking. They don’t think, as far as I know.
Am I a nostalgic human who fights to state his supremacy over machines?
Let’s ask this question to an AI. It will write something interesting, imitating from the Internet as many answers as possible that some humans gave. Is that writing? Or is it calculating the average essay about a topic?
Even human writers ground their content on an average of the content they read. True. Yet, humans add something more: their experience.
Life feeds experiences by connecting events, people, and feelings.
That’s the point: AIs don’t have a life.
That’s why they are pens, not writers.
That’s why they have a future in writing but are not the future of writing.
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