by TWC Founder/Director Judith Lindbergh
We recently made this formal announcement, one which seemed unnecessary. Implicit. We have been writing without A.I. since the beginning. Why would we start using it now?
But in the age of A.I., apparently we need to take a stand.
We first shared our new, official policy this summer at our teen Creative Writing Intensives. The announcement was met with applause and cheers. Yes, these extraordinary kids truly love writing. They don’t want A.I. to take over their creative brains any more than we do. But for others who don’t exactly embrace struggling with words–creatively or otherwise–avoiding the lure of A.I. is far more challenging.
Oddly, the problem isn’t just with developing writers. It’s deep in the professional publishing world, too. A few months ago, when we scheduled Jane Friedman to talk about What Writers Need to Know About A.I. on November 15, we knew the situation was dire. Now everywhere we turn, there’s another article. Another warning. Another optimistic Instagram post stating that real human writing and writers will win out while, time and again, shocking news proves them wrong.
Increasingly, literary journals, agents, and publishers require “100% human writing”–often with some kind of guarantee. Yet book deals and well-respected literary prizes have crumbled under accusations of A.I.-assisted writing. Meanwhile, The Authors Guild tested how effective today’s A.I. detectors really are. Most of the results were not encouraging.
Writing is difficult. We would be lying if we denied it. Sometimes your words fly from your fingers onto the page. At other times, you find yourself shuffling entire sections, cutting, rewriting, deleting again and again. Writing can be frustrating and exhausting. Even professional authors struggle and fail.
But the struggle is the point. Failing is just a step toward better writing.
In fact, it’s more than just better writing. Through the process and struggle, we learn how we think. We wrestle with ideas, weigh alternatives, and make critical choices. We learn to communicate with clarity and eventually with flare. We discover things we didn’t even know that we felt, and work through problems from the safety of the page.
When we give over our writing to A.I., even for a little idea-generating boost, we relinquish these precious lessons to the LLMs. These inhuman behemoths have absorbed all the good and all of the bad writing that exists in the vast digital reservoir of knowledge. Plots, characters, and literary voice are flattened by sameness, and brainstormed “suggestions” are the product of indiscernible blandness, like mixing all the colors of a painter’s palate until you end up with a brown the color of dung.
Another analogy: Think of highly processed foods. We know what they do to the body. What do they do to the mind? That’s basically what A.I. writing is.
Avoiding A.I. in writing is obviously vital for young, developing minds. But even adults who have been writing for decades continue to learn by wrestling with their work. Joan Didion wrote, “I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.” Writing exposes insights about the world and ourselves. Why would you give these invaluable opportunities away?
If writing is how we learn to think, what we give up to A.I. is our self-hood. Our individuality. Whatever compels us to pick up a pen or tap away on the keyboard burbles up from the depths of our subconscious. Writing is truly one of the acts that makes us human.
Sure, there are practical applications for A.I. If it can help find a cure for cancer or discover the origins of the Universe, I’m all in. But for creativity and self-expression (notice the prefix “self-”), let’s leave that to the humans.
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Learn What Writers Need to Know About A.I. on November 15, 2PM
with publishing industry expert Jane Friedman.
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TWC Founder/Director Judith Lindbergh, the author of Akmaral and The Thrall’s Tale, has been writing without A.I. for decades. She ran this post through Pangram, the publishing-industry standard A.I. testing app. She’s happy to report that it is 100% Human-written.
