Writing Doesn't Start with Words

It starts with experience. And robots don't have experiences.

I recently read John Warner’s new book, More Than Words: How to Think About Writing in the Age of AI (I found out about the book thanks to to Andrew Campbell’s always-excellent English Teacher Weekly Substack).

That title, More Than Words, is a reminder that, while the end product of writing is a sequence of words, words are not the “base units” of writing. Before words come thoughts and ideas. I would back it up even further than that: before thoughts and ideas come experiences. This is good news to any writer who is afraid of losing his or her job* to the robots. Robots don’t have experiences. For that matter, argues Warner, robots can’t think. They are incredibly good at processing information, but that’s not the same thing as thinking, and it’s a very long way from experiencing.

Warner writes,

Large language models do not “write.” They generate syntax. They do not think, feel, or experience anything. They are fundamentally incapable of judging truth, accuracy, or veracity. Any actions that look like the exercise of judgment are illusory.

He continues,

What I want to say about writing is that it is a fully embodied experience. When we do it, we are thinking and feeling. We are bringing our unique intelligences to the table and attempting to demonstrate them to the world, even when our intelligences don’t seem too intelligent. ChatGPT is the opposite, a literal averaging of intelligences, a featureless landscape of pattern-derived text. Why have we declared this a marvel when there’s an infinite supply of greater marvels all around us?

I actually do think ChatGPT is a marvel; it’s just not the same kind of marvel as the human mind at work. The act of “averaging of intelligences” into a “featureless landscape of pattern-derived text” can be exceedingly useful. But it is a poor substitute for one human being writing out of lived experience.

Here’s an experiment you can try. Go to ChatGPT and ask it “Can you give me an idea of what it would have been like to grow up in [your hometown] durning [the decades you were growing up]?” What comes back will be factually correct. It is true, for instance, that a lot of people my age went to the skating rink. But the robot knows nothing of the dread of a sixth-grade boy who knows that the couple-skate is going to start right after “YMCA” is over. Nor does the robot know about the other boy at the same skating rink, the roller-disco champion who was bullied so mercilessly but kept roller disco-ing anyway.

You can average experiences down to a common denominator, but nobody has an average experience. Your un-average experience, the experience that the robots have no access to—that’s where you need to live as a writer.

John Warner again:

We are people. Large language models will always be machines. To declare the machines superior means believing that what makes humans human is inherently inferior. I acknowledge that there are many people in the world who believe this is the case, that our fragile, frequently malfunctioning, inefficient meat sacks cause us all sorts of problems, but this does not mean we must view a possible cyborg future as some kind of “progress.”

If I didn’t believe in the human soul, I would be terrified of “artificial intelligence.” If human intelligence is strictly a function of neural networks, it is only a matter of time before computer networks are more intelligent than we are. But human beings have access to reality. Computers only have access to information.

I’ll wrap up with a word of hope and warning from John Warner:

Deep down, I believe that ChatGPT by itself cannot kill anything worth preserving. My concern is that out of convenience, or expedience, or through carelessness, we may allow these meaningful things to be lost or reduced to the province of a select few rather than being accessible to all.

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* If your job is “content creation”—copywriting, listicle writing, or any other writing geared toward “driving traffic”—you probably are going to lose your job to the robots if you haven’t already.

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Kelly Kapic Doesn't Think Too Highly of Himself (from the Archives)

This week’s episode comes from the archives. It first aired in January of 2022; this conversation with Kelly Kapic one of the Habit Podcast episodes I think about the most often. Kelly Kapic is a professor of theology at Covenant College near Chattanooga. His most recent book is You're Only Human: How Your Limits Reflect God's Design, and Why That Is Good News. In this episode, Dr Kapik and I talk about productivity, shame, gratitude and the truth that finiteness is actually a blessing. Also, we talk about magnanimity and pusillanimity.

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