On Human Authorship: What it Means to Write Something Real

Some Thoughts on Human Authorship

ChatGPT suffers from eternal writer’s block. Wholly functional language can never be inspired language.  

Human writers have things in common with AI. We regurgitate based on our training. We gravitate to probabilistic construction of prose.

Yet we also have the ability to read back over what we wrote and feel genuinely embarrassed by it. We humans stand apart from the machines when we sense the "wrongness" buried beneath the grammatical, logical, and even probabilistic construction of our sentences. In this sense, the "rightness," when felt, is also distinctly human.

To the extent that art is preoccupied with truth, a writer must either say something true or fail. The chance to strike at truth is what drives us to write. Inspiration differs from training because it stems from a belief: that the truth is really there, and that the writer has a fighting chance to get their words around it.

The future of AI is one of accuracy not truth. The abundance of data on which the AI is trained dwarfs the knowledge of any one human, and this includes data on the most prevalent, probabilistic formulations of prose. Future AI output will be supremely accurate, more so than the most talented human writer, so if accuracy is sufficient to satisfy readers' demands, then sure, writing as craft is dead. But if there’s something more to be desired, then I urge human writers to keep writing. Your work is valued.