AI and the Future of Writing-roundtable of authors discuss ramifications for art

MO’R There’s a recent piece by Gideon Lewis-Kraus in The New Yorker where he deeply reported on Anthropic and its building of Claude. One of the cofounders said that they’re surprised by a lot of what happens. He compared our understanding of this technology to the Wright brothers’ understanding of flight, and remarked that in spite of that rudimentary understanding, we have built a fleet of 747s and sent them into the most important parts of our society everywhere.

In that sense, I believe it is a decentering technology, in Daniel’s Copernican sense, but I also think we have to be very careful about the language we use. We’ve had many technologies before that have upended whole ways in which we organize society. But right now, as Alondra Nelson, a professor at the Institute for Advanced Study, put it, AI is an object of our inquiry and a tool we are using for inquiry all at once. And one thing I’ve noticed is that our collective conversation about AI has stalled before it could fully unfold.

AA Interfacing with the technology, I’ve noticed that it both sharpens and dulls my ability with language. Like the iPhone, it’s transforming my thought processes. I find I’m having to work to stay sharp. Which means a greater commitment to the discipline of reading, right now, for example, in the English Renaissance, where the possibilities of language are still so rich—Edmund Spenser, Shakespeare. I find I’m spending so much more time honing my abilities with language, even as I watch them being worn away. In short, I’ve had to double down.

One of the things I find encouraging is the way I’m seeing that AI will make ever more clear the distinction between the machine and what we are. Conversations about the interior and what we may or may not want to call “the soul” are going to become more relevant. As far as the humanities go, I think English majors are going to be in demand. The ability to deploy language associatively, richly, and precisely is going to be a strategic advantage in a way that computer science no longer is.

JS Daniel, you have had the longest relationship with AI of anybody on the panel. You’ve been working with it since 2020?

DK I was invited in early 2020 to take part in an experiment; I flew to San Francisco, where I got access to an algorithm and tried to write a literary text with it. And no one outside the tech world had access to LLMs back then. It wasn’t very good. I mean, compared with today, it was ridiculous, but back then, compared with what we knew, it was utterly amazing. I couldn’t write a good short story with it; I couldn’t even write a mediocre short story with it, but something close to mediocre. The way it worked was that I put in a sentence, and then it added a sentence, and then I put in a sentence. It worked for two to three pages before it started freezing or repeating itself, but it was still astonishing. I used it for a while as a party trick.

Then, in early 2021, I gave a talk in Germany about this experience. The talk was published as a little booklet with a beautiful cover. Today, the only thing about this little tiny book that’s interesting is that it feels like it’s five hundred years old. So much has happened since then in terms of technical progress that I asked the publisher to please take it out of circulation, and they did.

JS What is the stance that one should adopt toward artificial intelligence?

MO’R I don’t want to be prescriptive. As a cultural critic, I notice that we tend to fall into binaries and prescriptiveness when we talk about AI, and we have from the start. When you look at the critical discourse around AI, going back to when it was first imagined in the academy, it tends to move from the dystopic to the utopian.

JS Anxiety, I think, is one of the dominant emotions that humanists and writers feel about AI. Is it justified? Is it just something we should learn to live with?

MO’R I cannot answer that question for you. But what I can do is start to describe categories of what it’s like to use it and why that anxiety exists. First of all, the technology is new. Second, it’s going to displace some of what we hold most dear, such as the sanctuary of deep sustained attention, things like the possibility of the soul, of individual expressiveness. I believe in language as an art—as a place for thinking that isn’t transactional or corporatized, that allows for opacity, resistance, and difficulty. AI threatens that. It’s a kind of productivity amplifier in a world where we were already organized around overproduction. Third, when I go online now, I am surrounded by manufactured language, which is deadening. It threatens something I find important.

That said, I think it’s too easy to stop there. We also have to consider: What else does AI do? What kinds of research does it facilitate? What kinds of accessibility does it create even as it takes more away? How are scientists using it to facilitate better diagnostics for stigmatized groups? And then: How does this change our relationship to government, as citizens—to the prospect of surveillance and AI-first war?