I resist defining human writing against machine writing because this framing brings me closer to that state of mind. When I imagine reading texts selected to prove that humans write differently, I find myself transported back to a classroom, asking myself, can I tell? Can I define what makes these uniquely human? I don’t like to read like that. I don’t read a great book while thinking about how much better it is than other books. That closes me off, limits me to a little section of my judgmental mind. Instead, I want to expand—I want to open myself up to the possibility of resonating with the text, of being disturbed by the text. For this to happen, I need to park my preconceived notions at the door and enter into the experience wholeheartedly. There is no room in this for questions of goodness versus badness, realness versus fakeness.
This is true for writing, translation, and editing as well as reading: the focus on comparative evaluation undermines the creative process. (All these activities are creative!) The creative process has been beautifully described by several writers in recent years, often in response to the rise of writing machines. George Saunders has talked about it on his Substack, and Kae Tempest, in On Connection, suggests that connection to ourselves and others is fundamental to creativity—this is something machines simply can’t do for us. I won’t discuss their arguments here, if only because it seems so obvious to me that texts that emerge from a deep creative process are often original and inimitable.
I’m not saying that a text is valuable in proportion to the level of its originality and inimitability. That’s putting the cart before the horse. I believe this conflation, which has existed since long before LLMs, has tempted I believe this conflation has tempted many writers into empty play with forms. Sure, formal play is valuable, because it can help distract our controlling mind, trapped in the sterile loops of habitual forms, and help us find some way into the murky parts of ourselves we usually avoid—a fundamental part of the creative process. Trying to sound as weird as possible for the sake of it, however, is as much of a fruitless distraction as automatic imitation is.
Now, let’s take it in the other direction: we can imagine a future in which the best human writing cannot be distinguished from machine output. This might be achieved on the back of uncompensated creative labor, which is a problem that needs to be addressed. But if we park the economic question for just a moment, it seems self-evident to me that the machines cannot win, from the point of view of the writer. The machine is an information processor. Information processing as such is not what is at stake here. Imagine a machine launched on a one-way trip to outer space to map the behavior of intergalactic particles. Marvelous maps floating out beyond the Milky Way are irrelevant. It doesn’t matter how good a teacher is at math if they don’t teach their pupils to do sums. It’s only our own creative process that can plumb our murky depths. So let machines write stories and poems. This might as well be happening in another galaxy, from the point of view of a writer, a person, sinking into the space that opens up between them and the blank page—that’s where it all happens.
The value of literature in my life has increased in direct proportion with my choice to simply be with the page in front of me, letting go of what I’m supposed to read to be on the right side of history, what I’m supposed to be interested in writing about, the conclusions I’m supposed to come to, how original my writing or the texts I translate need to be to beat others. The process is the gift that keeps on giving. Increasingly, I find satisfaction in personally sharing words with people I know and like, allowing moments of resonance. Here’s what I believe: even if machine text starts to flood the book market, we will continue to thirst for the real thing and create spaces for it. The real thing will always be accessible, irrespective of what a machine might write, and irrespective of whether or not people can make a living in the field. It would be a tragedy if these technological changes killed literary ecosystems, but we should keep in mind why that would be a tragedy. The open-ended creative process shouldn’t be sacrificed out of fear for the future of the publishing industry—and this is precisely what happens when we start collectively writing towards a planned conclusion (like ‘AI bad’).
I do worry about a future with ubiquitous AI, yet another step towards the tyranny of quantity. But this cannot be undone by following the same logic and launching into warfare with a zero-sum mentality, forcing our words in an effort to beat the machine in an effort to beat the machine. If we wage war in defence of creative writing, and use writing in service of this war, we risk forgetting why we were defending it in the first place; we may end up thinking the point was to prove that human books burn better. While we call for legislation and protection, let’s keep in mind that human literature, the kind that is worth protecting, needs the free space that opens up between us and the page. I hope that, sometime soon, it will feel like a silly dream when we think back to the loathing and fascination that machine writing used to elicit in us. That’s cool, we’ll think when a friend shows us its latest products, and then we’ll turn our attention back to our planet, our communities, ourselves, no longer doubting that it’s our engagement with our own little world that opens us to the cosmos.
