Why it’s difficult to write anymore
Once upon a time, singers used to tour far and wide in unforgivable weather, and sing. Not pout in front of the mic. Not make cute faces either. Not count dance steps either. Just play music and sing like the sky is on fire. Mad crowd used to show up to witness them belt out song after song. And when they were finally done—after endless encore requests—they used to grant interviews to entertainment magazines in their hoarse voice. Pure professionals. Back then, irrespective of the genre, singing meant something divine. Not everyone could do it.
Autotune knocked the door more than twice in the 1990s and changed the whole game.
All of a sudden, anyone with a little bit of pubic hair could sing like there is no tomorrow. And to make things worse, the musicians started lip-syncing and dancing and frolicking on the stage more than they actually sang to the crowd. To make things worst, people didn’t care either. They are not there to soak in the collective experience anyway. They are there simply to record themselves attending a show. They are least interested in noticing that their favourite singer can’t really sing without autotune.
This is a prime example of how technology keeps on giving. The problem is, it doesn’t know when or where to stop. Even Prometheus stopped at fire. Technology keeps pushing the boundaries of what sets an individual unique from the rest. Before you know it, everyone is singing and nobody is listening. An optimistic way to look at this is, we’d be finally free from the clutches of art. No more deeper meaning; no more philosophical heartaches. Only hollow existence filled with screens.
A similar trend is picking up pace in the field of writing too. AI tools are converting briefs into long immaculate paragraphs. People who used to struggle with composing a resignation letter are now coming across as Booker Prize-nominated writers. You can now key in a few words and AI can even churn out gut-wrenching poems for you.
Quite an amazing reversal of fortune for a species that hasn’t figured out the difference between education and literacy.
On the other hand, AI is fast convincing people that writing isn’t such a big deal: just feed in the appropriate nudges and GPT will do the rest. Yes, the end product might sound a bit soulless but what’s the big deal? At least you don’t have to be embarrassed about mistaking a comma for a semicolon. Booyah!
I find this transformation—not revolution, as incorrectly called—amusing at best and gimmicky at worst. For centuries, even in the literate parts of the world, writing scared people for an obvious reason: written (typed?) words expose you and nobody likes to be exposed. As a result, most people found it difficult to pen decent prose, let alone, poetry. Even after the advent of the internet, people continued to find comfort in typing on forums/platforms under absolute anonymity. This behaviour is peak evolution but nobody seems to realize it.
Forgive me, I am an old soul. In fact, I invented the concept of old school. I actually went to a typing class after 10th class and have a typewriter at home. I know that I am not against technology either. But I also accept that very few activities are as humbling as writing. You write and rewrite and through those silent pangs of iteration, you assume you’ve come up with something unique only to acknowledge later that it wasn’t that unique. Insofar, I am not at all comfortable letting ChatGPT think for me when I am fully capable of thinking for myself. I’ve got nothing against those who are harvesting the crops of AI-enabled data to improve their writing. Good for them. Nothing wrong, ethically speaking, in using more effective words but at the same time, we have to be cognizant about the uniqueness of human expression.
At the end of the day, an essay composed by AI is an essay composed by AI.
AI is able to do this for you, within a fraction of seconds, because it has understood something that you have been missing out on. It reads and reads and reads. Without reading, there is no writing. It is fully capable of writing for you today because it has been trained to read billions and billions and billions of prose and poetry. Without reading, there is no writing.
So, yes, artificial intelligence can help you shine by making you appear like an accomplished writer—not necessarily, a quasi-original thinker—but the page-burning question of our era is, can it make you sound like an insightful reader? The answer is no. Or better still, not yet. It can write for you but it can’t read for you. You will have to do the reading yourself.
Good luck with that.
Another way to look at AI "revolution" is that now people are going to put more value on the writers that really write and out effort in their words. A writer that avoids AI is going to be like a watchmaker that handcrafts each piece compared to a factory that churns out pieces by the thousand.
The age of real writers is just starting.