Maybe you can never know whether these lines have been written by an AI language model or by the claim of the author of the text – me. But why does it matter? After all, having the help of a language model to write anything I’d like to is not only fascinating, but more efficient (and, probably, even grammatically and stylistically better than my own writing). The argument that follows is that, in doing so, I could have more free time to pursue other endeavors of my choice. I could learn to play an instrument, exercise, and do creative activities like painting, pottery and, guess what, writing!

If we are solely concerned with the end result of everything we do, we lose the whole inconvenient, messy, unclear and yet rewarding process of getting there. For writing, that means missing the process of maturing an idea, going through drafts, thinking about how to expose an argument, erase paragraphs, rewrite lines and so on and so forth. Yes, it’s not efficient. And that’s what makes writing humane.

But what AI language models brought to us is a tempting tool of comparison. For writing, that means I cannot write as fast as an AI model. And while I can come up with a prompt in my mind and tell my brain to write about genuine writing in the digital era, I cannot immediately start typing hundreds of words that will form a coherent text in a matter of seconds.

We are obsessed with saving time. We can’t endure any inconveniences. AI language models invite writers to accelerate their writing up to a level which is humanly impossible to follow. They offer writers a powerful shortcut. While I write these lines, there is a part of my brain that is telling me: “Leo, why don't you simply copy and paste that into ChatGPT and work on top of what the model gives back to you? For sure you will be done with that text so much faster!”. On the other hand, the critical side of my brain challenges me: “But why do you want to speed it up? Why don’t you respect your rhythm to write a text of your own?”.

You’ve probably heard about neuroplasticity, which is the brain’s ability to adapt itself to whatever is more useful and rewarding for our survival. And this serves a primal evolutionary function: to save energy. The brain requires a lot of energy just to operate its daily functions, so whatever we can optimize in our lives to save brain energy, we will do. Our brain loves being in an automatic mode. Imagine how exhausting it would be if we had to think every day how to brush our teeth, how to ride a bike, how to cut beef and eat with a fork. Remember when you were learning handwriting at school? So much time was needed to write a short sentence. But then, as we keep training and executing these tasks, our brain consolidates the neural circuits to repeat these tasks in habitual ways. That’s a rough evolutionary explanation for why it is so convenient to not consciously think about everything we do. So it’s obvious to say that the less we practice a skill – such as writing without AI models – every time we attempt to do so, the harder it will be. 

Add to it the fact that we live in a fast-paced digital society that often rewards high productivity over quality and monetizes our attention. These two pieces together make the perfect recipe for not doing any kind of genuine writing for its own sake. Rather, the message we are getting from society is that as long as we have many clicks, views and likes, we are doing good! These are the socio-economic metrics that matter. And because we’re socially wired animals, we tend to do what society rewards us with.

The result is that, if we sit down to write anything, our intention is corrupted in the first place: we write not for the sake of writing, but with the goal to post it as fast as we can to keep up with the online pressure to generate content and improve our personal brand (which, by the way, is another metric: we no longer see ourselves as human beings but as a product exposed in the marketplace [hence brand] that needs constant updates and improvements to get attention from buyers). 

Music composers are now having to compete with firms that use AI to compose hundreds of songs a day with the goal of selling them to famous interpreters and become a new popular hit — I’m not even going to start the discussion on copyrights. What impresses me is that there is no social shame in that.

AI language models are everything but neutral. Their raison d’être is to be used and fed by us. And they are getting better each day, so why bother having to sit down and contemplate about the importance of genuine writing? Because I hope that, by now, you understand that my point is not about genuine writing. Or at least not only about it. It’s about how we, individually and collectively, are being profoundly shaped and transformed by the mere existence of AI language models.

To give my example: even if I refuse to use an AI language model for writing this text, I cannot ignore its existence. I am still embedded in an economic system which is obsessed with developing AI and obsessed to apply it to as many things as possible. In that way, I’m also pressured to some extent to deal with this technology, because if I just refuse to use AI language models in my life, that could become a competitive disadvantage for me. I must confess that I have felt a strong temptation to write more, post more online, produce more content, and seek greater visibility. And I know that AI language models could bring so much more efficiency to my life.

Yet, I urge myself to resist using it when I am consciously attempting to expose my own ideas through writing, and I have my own reasons. Let me just give one of them.

I’m afraid of the consequences that in the endless pursuit of optimization and efficiency brought further by AI-driven language models, we become more like machines than better human beings. Optimization and efficiency, like French philosopher Jacques Ellul told us in the 60s, are technological values. However, as modern technology increasingly permeates our lives to a point where we can no longer draw a clear line of separation between what falls in the technological domain and what falls in the human domain – as postphenomenology correctly approaches it – we end up expecting that ourselves and others also follow the same logic that applies to technology, incorporating these same values of efficiency and optimization into human values. In other words, we see ourselves as products subject to endless optimization, as this was the purpose of a life worth living. But by keeping comparing our performance to those of machines, particularly AI, we very quickly realize that we have already lost the battle. The question that follows is existential: if we manage to create machines that can outperform ourselves in almost every task (including language!), what is left for us? Maybe we need to reframe how we understand and replicate the narratives and metaphors about technology and its relationship to ourselves.

Precisely, genuine writing is an act of sobriety and humanity against our prevalent optimization-driven lives. It brings back the imperfection, the inconsistencies, the patience, everything that we are constantly told not to bear. Consider the ancient habit of journaling, which is about bringing all of what’s happening in our inner world onto a piece of paper. The end goal of journaling is not to finish the journal but journaling itself. We would miss the point of journaling were we to give some prompts to a language model about our day, asking it to journal it for us. And why is that? Because it is through the slow process of writing that we structure our thoughts, feelings, concerns and so on. It’s about the way, not the result.

Journaling on paper is also subjectively different from journaling on a computer. Typing a keyboard is faster than handwriting, sure it is. But again: are we measuring everything as efficient/not efficient by how much time is needed to accomplish a task? Several scientific studies have demonstrated that handwriting has more positive cognitive implications on the writer than typewriting, particularly when looking at the capacity of retaining information and of conceptual thinking. Reducing everything we do to how fast we can do them narrows our existence into one that understands and treats everything as a means to an end.

Don't get me wrong. I'm not suggesting that using your laptop for writing undermines what I call 'genuine writing' or that it should be avoided. I use my laptop daily for various tasks, including writing. Take this article, for example: whenever I have a new draft, I don’t need to mail my manuscript to my editor in the Netherlands. Instead, I can send it instantly via email, making our collaboration much more efficient. He can add comments, suggest edits, and send it back to me—all without either of us struggling with each other’s handwriting! Emails, the internet, laptops, tablets, and smartphones provide us with great shortcuts, reducing the time needed to complete tasks. However, none of these technologies offer a convenient substitute for the act of writing itself.

When AI language models prove to be able to do that – and are advancing incredibly fast – they bring a whole new level to the endless pursuit of optimization game we are all inevitably playing, as we very quickly became tempted to outsource writing itself. Afterall, what’s the harm? Ellul said once that “every technological step forward has its price […] we must always ask ourselves what price we have to pay for something”.

Maybe the price is that we are increasingly impatient with whatever takes time to mature. We want to speed up everything and simply can’t bear the natural flow of things. Not only the process of writing, but also how relationships are formed and developed, the voice messages from WhatsApp, the videos we watch online, and the time it takes for a product we just bought online to arrive at our door. Paradoxically, regardless of how much faster we can get things out of the way, the more we complain about lack of time.

I realize that whether we are willing to perfect writing or any skill in whatever domain, there is no shortcut, no app, no AI that can do it for ourselves. Yes, it’s uncomfortable at the start, as it does not save brain energy. And that’s because anything we do with the intention to elevate our spirit, our consciousness, our physical health, our ability to think critically, will undeniably encounter resistance, either our own or from others. However, the rewards we experience by practicing a task consistently until we master it is not measured in likes nor views, which give us quick hits of dopamine, but it’s a more long-lasting personal fulfillment and sense of joy. It’s the joy we experience by recognizing ourselves through the piece of work that we did – whether it is an article, a PhD thesis, a song or a complex project.

Otherwise, if we keep throwing ourselves mindlessly into all the conveniences offered by modern language models as a legitimate replacer for genuine writing, we face the risk of losing the beauty of experiencing and exploring how powerful, complex, ambiguous and, for these very reasons, fascinating our minds are. Genuine writing is an invitation to expand our existence and ways to interpret and reinterpret our lives in a world that is ever-increasingly populated by machines.