When ChatGPT made its debut in late 2022, I worried that it would take away the joy of writing. The skills I’d gained from thousands of hours and millions of words was about to go the way of butter churning.
Fortunately, I’m a bad predictor of things. In the future I foresaw in 2007, today’s Web would be littered with Flash sites and the iPhone would go down as a failed experim—hold on I’m getting a call on my razr right now, just one sec.
And with that, I have good news, all ye writers. We’ve been far enough down the track of AI that I can say with good confidence that I was wrong about my worries about the future of writing.
I’m feeling pretty good about writing today. In fact, I’m enjoying it more now than I ever have before.
Part of this is due to age. As you get older, you have more history and findings to write against. And for whatever reason, you like to get thoughts out of your head more often. Maybe there’s no more space in the aging brain and the thoughts have to go somewhere. It feels bad to just let them evaporate.
But, the other part of this is my realization that AI can only touch the things I want it to touch.
The whole programming thing? At first, I was a little defensive. Now? Yes! Many of those annoying details, the corner cases, the trees, the arrays, the nested bits? I know they’re there. I’ll call them out. But go ahead and wring those out for me. Please, wire this thing to that thing. By all means, suggest a better way of making this all work.
Of course, we’re all still figuring out the right balance with code—making sure our vibes don’t keep running into corners we can’t get out of. But what we do know is there’s some serious permanence to this relationship, we’re just finding its dynamic.
But what about for writing?
See, I’ve always thought of programming as a kind of writing. But AI has separated the oil from the water. For me at least, they feel more different than ever.
Programming = picking out words + a whole bunch of other hard requirements. The stuff that makes a thing work. The stuff that makes 99.9% success rates a broken codebase. The stuff that AI can really help iron out if you can work with it just right.
Writing (at least the kind I like to do) = picking out words + the art of the thought. I meander when I write. Sometimes thinking before typing, sometimes typing before thinking, sometimes the two going back and forth frantically catching each other’s tail.
When my writing feels good, I don’t know where any of it’s going. It’s just going. No real goal but to feel like I painted a complete thought that’s still wet to the touch when I’m done.
By the end of any good piece, I’m somewhere I couldn’t predict. I find conclusions I didn’t realize until I put my fingers to the keyboard.
I’m writing to figure out what I’m writing about. A seed of an idea pops into my head and I need to write it out to see what it blossoms into. Sometimes nothing and I stop. That’s how it’s always been. And when it does blossom? That’s the intoxicating high of writing.
All of this is kind of hallucinatory. And AI just can’t help me here. You can’t—I don’t think—prompt for a hallucination.
Help can only come from the act of writing. And I think this is true for most people that love to write. So there’s nothing, save a good synonym, that I really need to ask a robot for. And I could’ve asked a thesaurus for this years ago too.
The topic, in programming, makes the output worthwhile. It is its core value. The eloquence is incidental—and it’s tied deeply to the goals of the topic. AI thrives on that dependency.
The topic, in writing, is often the incidental part. The eloquence—that particular voicing from the writer—is independent of the topic. It’s what makes that writing valuable.
Maybe you could train AI to sound so exactly like you, but the greatest critic of that replication would be—you. Ever record yourself speak? Look at a photo of you and notice how odd your actual face looks (vs the reflection in the mirror)? Others might not detect the difference but you certainly will. And all the joy of writing would go with it.
So, I’m breathing a sigh of relief.
Writers, I think we’re good for a long while.