Too many Chicken Littles
This article is ostensibly about writing for AI, something that I find very interesting. However, the first half of the article gets kinda lost in rather silly speculation about superintelligence this and AI ressurecting minds that. It's a long article, and I only found the latter half interesting.
I don't want to be too cavalier and dismiss anyone who criticizes the changes technology brings about in our lives, but I'm running out of patience for the breathless Chicken Littles. Widespread literacy has been with us humans for a few hundred years maybe. Cultures that rely heavily on writing have been around for a few thousands of years. These things aren't necessarily integral to what it means to be human. We've used writing and reading to get to where we are, but that doesn't mean we can't progress unless we keep reading and writing exactly as some ideal of what they've always been.
AI (and the internet) are changing reading and writing
This is so obvious that it almost doesn't need to be said. I read this article hoping that it would delve more deeply into how this change is happening or what it looks like. If the author had been able to get over his starry-eyed superintelligence nightmares, perhaps he could have come to something more interesting.
Nonetheless, there was this:
For those who write to be understood and analyzed, it’s possible AI readers will be satisfying. I’ve already found Claude disquietingly decent at grasping my own work, though I sometimes have to prompt it a bunch to get the most insightful comments. No matter: Soon enough, anyone who wants one can have their own private Lionel Trilling.For those who write simply to write, who are fine without commanding a mass audience, the near future will require making some profound choices. The idea of writing a novel for AI doesn’t sound very satisfying. It sounds horrible. But it may be more satisfying and less horrible than the alternative: writing a novel for no one at all. The dilemma will be more real and painful than it sounds now. If forced to choose between writing for no one or for something—some thing—some writers will choose the thing, and it’s not clear they’d be wrong. To borrow a line Cowen uses in a slightly different context, “AI is your chance to have an enduring audience—even if it is not exactly the one you envisioned.”But for those who write to provoke some emotional response in the reader, this might be the end of the road. Maybe the machines will develop feelings or conscious experience, maybe their artificial neurons will do the equivalent of crying or laughing—eventually there’s a good chance that might happen—but don’t count on it happening while you’re alive. (Another reason to write for resurrection?)
While this is a fun way to break things down, it seems more likely to me that the distinction will be between those who are interested in creating and those who are scared to try new things. In the year of our Lord 2025, there are still painters and painting is still valued, even though we have printers that can do magical things.
I suspect writing in the way we have all come to know it these last hundreds of years, will continue on much like painting, probably with more widespread interest and staying power.
But that's not very exciting to me. What I find curious is what new forms writing takes on. Humans are writing quite a lot on social media. Short little fragments of writing, but it's also written conversation. Prior to the internet, I don't believe this phenomenon of a human conversation was frequently created via text only. That's curious.
Writing for AI, writing with AI, being with AI
Mostly articles like the one I'm linking to here talk about writing for AI: basically SEO for AI training. But it's also true that the primary way I interact with any LLM is via a little dialog text box. Prompting is kind of like writing for AI, as well. Although it's possible that prompting veers more into the frame of writing with AI. Writing with AI (in the sense of using AI to help you write) gets a bad rap right now -- although working with AI to do research and analysis in the course of writing something is more palatable.
But at some point, I suspect we get to writing and AI is present just like computers are present when we write. There isn't much conversation about how the transition from writing by hand to writing by computer changed our experience of the written word (I'm sure it did on a massive scale). AI will probably infest our lives as thoroughly as did computers, and writing will expand and change just as thoroughly, and it will probably be okay.