Who cares? The reactions show that people do care. AI-spotting has become a mania. Prose is being scrutinised with the attention, and jargon, once reserved for Latin literature. Literary criticism has rarely been so hot.
Arcane rhetorical terms like antithesis and epanorthosis (the “not X, but Y” construction) and tricolon (threefold things, like “veni, vidi, vici”) are bandied about by social-media users with the verve of Ciceronian scholars.
The first thing that a millennium of English writing shows is that most people are terrible at it. AI can be bad; humans are often worse. Dan Brown offered: “His eyes went white, like a shark about to attack. Lee Child offered the phrase: “It was about as distinctive as the most distinctive thing you could ever think of. AI, by contrast, writes with the ease of the easiest thing you could ever think of. And though it can be bad, it often isn’t. Yet English literature also shows that writing is not just the act of spewing words onto a page. Writing, as writers point out, is no more merely words on the page than a smile is joy, or a tear is sorrow. Real writing is not writing at all. It is thinking; specifically it is thinking: “What do I think? For how, as a character quoted by E.M. Forster puts it, “can I tell what I think till I see what I say? But counterfeit currency is always disliked; AI writing is not. Few would object to someone using AI to contest a parking fine, fill in a tax return or for a second-language speaker to polish their English. If a company uses AI to announce a new parking policy, few care. It certainly makes social media shriek. So here is the AI paradox. AI prose is easier to produce and often better than human prose. Yet humans do not like it; they may impair their ability by using it and they often loathe its use by others. This may be ridiculous but is encouraging. As humanity destroys its intellectual dominion with its own intellect—as it is beaten back in chess, in Go, in coding—we retain one last advantage: we are human. And, for now, humans (often) prefer to read humans. So make the most of that and, as E.M. And probably write personal emails yourself. For more expert analysis of the biggest stories in Britain, sign up to Blighty, our weekly subscriber-only newsletter.
Happily there is a body of evidence dating back a few years (about 1,300) on what good writing is. It can write a sonnet in half a second, a 1,000-word article in ten seconds, an Austen-length novel in half an hour.
The em-dash, the most notorious AI “tell”, seems to be acting as—another rhetorical word—a synecdoche, the term for when writers use a part for the whole, like “wheels” for “car” or, perhaps, “em-dash” for “the intellectual obsolescence of the human race”. This, says Maryanne Wolf, an emeritus professor of neuroscience at UCLA, is not a battle over punctuation. It is a “battle for our minds”. AI is so “unprecedented”, says Steven Pinker, a professor at Harvard, that we cannot tell how, or whether, it will affect the English language. It is called “English literature”. They find it painful to do (“like a long bout of some painful illness”, as George Orwell had it) and produce words that are almost as painful to read. William Wordsworth offered an ode to a spade (it began “Spade!”). In a recent blind tasting of two short stories, one human-written and one AI-written, researchers from the University of Villanova found that respondents rated the AI story as “higher quality and more absorbing”. Often “you only really know what you think by writing it,” says Emma Smith, a professor of English at Oxford. When Michael Gove, the editor of the Spectator and an ex-MP, was in the cabinet he told his underlings to “Think in ink. To make a good argument you need to have followed its logic “step by step”—in writing. Those who use AI to write speeches are, he says, using “counterfeit currency”. But, says Colleen Kirk, a professor at the New York Institute of Technology, if that policy was problematic and the company apologised using AI—then “You’ve got a big problem. You risk activating “moral disgust”. In 1970 a Japanese robotics expert, Mori Masahiro, noted that the more human a robot looks, the more affinity humans feel for it—until it becomes too human, whereupon affinity turns to revulsion: the “uncanny valley”. If you shook someone’s hand in a darkened room and, unexpectedly, clasped a prosthetic hand you would, Mori wrote, “shriek”. AI writing—bland, plasticky, human-ish—seems to sit in the “uncanny valley” of prose. Forster also said, “Only connect”. Especially to your “[Dearest Husband]”.
