Writing is not that important

A new kind of AI psychosis is taking hold and Substack is ground zero

“The puppet dancers.” (J.-J. Grandville, 1840s)

Y’all are making yourselves crazy about AI writing.

It’s true the internet is filling up with oceans of meritless text, but that’s been the state of the internet since well before AI came along. Folks are making themselves mental out there looking for writing that smells like it had a robot’s help, but is it really worth all the fuss?

Sam Kriss has declared himself AI sheriff. As far as I can tell, he does it by gut. Meanwhile, Taylor Lorenz brought in her own robot to sniff out robots.

But it is just very hard for me to care about this latest “threat” to the very important business of writing as a profession. Since the 90s, this body of work has been shot in both hands, both feet, the left arm and the right leg.

If someone has their gun out and taken aim at our left leg can we really be that concerned at this point? Why not just aim it at our head and get it over with?

Writing is no big deal

Before AI, there was a vast ocean of writing produced by hand every day that had nothing special about it. Though completely composed without the aid of LLMs, these compositions still had no notable destiny. They served no purpose beyond their fleeting utility, at best as datapoints in history.

Most writing matters no more than the email you just sent your boss explaining why you have to be late next Friday. It is written quickly, read once, considered briefly and forgotten forever.

Just as the same paint can be used to compose a gloppy mess of a still life in some college junior’s elective art course as might have been used to paint Van Gogh’s Field with irises at Arles.

Though a category of stuff might occasionally be assembled in a special way, that doesn’t mean we need to be precious about the stuff itself.

There will never be an edition of LinkedIn for Dummies that will join the Western canon. No memos about properly filling out time sheets using the new HR software will be preserved for their humane poetry. No account of the victory of the West Ralph girls JV basketball team over Chesterton will be savored by future generations.

So much writing can easily be written by AI, and it probably might as well be.¹

Writing does not inherently matter.

Writing is mad. It is stringing together a series of lossy symbols in an attempt to recreate moments from a wildly complex and ever changing universe. Writing never even comes close to achieving its intention. And yet we keep doing it. We love it. Even though it’s almost always mostly wrong, to some of us it feels so right, because our minds are wired to operate using these same inept graphical representations that you are perusing here.

And sometimes there is writing that matters. When Martin Luther King, Jr. was in jail and decided to write a letter, that mattered. That was a piece of writing we couldn’t do without.

But Paul Revere warned his neighbors that the British were coming on the back of a horse, but that doesn’t make all the hundreds of thousands of other horse rides any less pedestrian.

The fact that the rare piece of writing matters very much does not make any old bit of writing any more important.

Support writers

In the age of TikTok, it’s hard for me to care that much if a new ocean of slop comes to the web. The slop was up to my nose before Sam Altman ever got to work, frankly.

Would I like to live in a new era of appreciation for the handmade? Of course. But it’s hard for me to believe that hating things will manifests it. It seems obvious to me that the era of appreciating the work of humans can only be borne of appreciating humans — not from vilifying the inhuman.

And yet writers are out there with long rhetorical knives, gleefully hacking and slashing at anyone who appears to defect from the presumed consensus that we must all be sure to produce every single sentence with our own precious, brilliant, irreplicable fingers.

And what bothers me most is that anyone — human or computer — can be so arrogant² as to believe that they can actually really know what is or isn’t AI generated, when all AI does is imitate us, and the main thing we do (frankly) is imitate each other.

If you go looking for AI slop, you will surely find it — even if it’s not really there. Slop policing is digital phrenology.

The house of literature has been leaking, its windowpanes have been rotted and the siding has been falling off all around us ever since Craigslist went online. I’m not sure literature actually can be saved, but writers attacking other writers isn’t going to save it.

I know that.

If you care at all about writing, whether as an art form, as a mode of communication or as a business model that’s swirling down the drain of sustainability, let me tell you something you can do about it that will mean 1,000 times more, every time, than any instance of accusing someone else of using the wrong tool:

You can be nice about someone else who is doing a good job.

1. Go with God, Plain-Dealer. Take it from me: the reporting really is the hard part and it’s 90% of what anyone cares about.

2. Yeah. You saw ‘em. Em dashes! IDGAF.