That's Not Writing, That's...

An infrequent reader of this Substack pointed me in the direction of this column by Bret Stephens. He had me at the headline:

I don’t always read Mr. Stephens’ columns, but I gobbled this one with relish. It included tasty lines like these:

The problem with writing with A.I. is that it’s mentally enfeebling — an escalator toward a result when you really need to make a daily habit of taking the stairs.

As it becomes ubiquitous, it undermines not only our individual ability to write but also a society’s collective ability to reason, a culture’s inner capacity to create and everyone’s reason to care.

And here’s a paragraph that is so well crafted it deserves a chef’s kiss.

What, uniquely, does writing do? It compels thought. It compels thinking in ways that silent contemplation or spoken language rarely can. It compels us to subject our thinking to the effort of articulation, the rigor of grammar, the tests of intelligibility and coherence, the inspection of others. In doing so, it also enjoins us to be clear, logical, accurate — and accountable. People may easily forgive a word said in anger but not so easily one written in anger, precisely because the fact that it was written tells us that it was considered.

One more, and I’ll let you read the rest yourself.

We become better writers by the constant effort that mundane writing demands. We become better thinkers by investing into that writing a degree of attention we’d never give it if we relinquished the task to A.I. We become more creative when we learn how to put a personal stamp even on routine things, making them unmistakably our own.

But Stephens’ column misses an important point.

Which I’ve made here.

Writers like me, who work for hire, like to think that we deliver A-grade writing, but what happens when C-minus is just fine with readers and publishers alike?

Bret Stephens knows, as I know, that the number of people who notice, let alone care about good writing is dwindling faster than you can say “YouTube.”

Philip Roth famously estimated the number of readers of serious fiction at 120,000.

“I don’t think there’s a decline of the novel so much as the decline of the readership,” Mr. Roth said, mounting what he admitted was a favorite hobbyhorse. “There’s been a drastic decline, even a disappearance, of a serious readership. That’s inescapable. We can’t fail to see it. It’s also inescapable, given the pressures in the society. That’s a tragedy. By readers, I don’t mean people who pick up a book, once in a while. By readers, I mean people who when they are at work during the day think that after dinner tonight and after the kids are in bed, I’m going to read for two hours. That’s what I mean. No. 2, these people do it three or four nights a week for two and half, three hours, and while they do it they don’t watch television or answer the phone.

“So if that’s what readers are, how many of them are there? We are down to a gulag archipelago of readers. Of the sort of readers I’ve described, there are 176 of them in Nashville, 432 in Atlanta, 4,011 in Chicago, 3,017 in Los Angeles and 7,000 in New York. It adds up to 60,000 people. I assure you there are no more. We would be foolish to add a zero. Maybe there are 120,000. But that’s it, and that is bizarre.”

Philip Roth made those comments in 1993, well before today’s reality of algorithms that can write books.

The Times reported that AI-generated books are now a growing part of the industry.

A few years into the A.I. era, there is sobering evidence that a significant and growing portion of the novels being sold are written with or by chatbots, and that readers are buying them.

A new study conducted by computer scientists using A.I. detection software to analyze thousands of self-published novels on Amazon, found that a substantial number of those novels contained chatbot-generated prose.

“In genre fiction, people are using A.I. to write these books, and readers are not able to tell,” said Tuhin Chakrabarty, a professor of computer science at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, who led the research.

What kind of books are we talking about?

There are at least some A.I. novels for sale on Barnes & Noble’s website, including “Fighting Love’s Flame,” a steamy romance about an Alaskan smokejumper and a documentary filmmaker who falls for him, and “Tumbleweeds & Tequila,” about a woman who is stranded in the desert and rescued by a hot ex-Navy Seal. Both books were published by Future Fiction Press, a new publishing company that produces novels using A.I. The books’ overviews on the Barnes & Noble website disclose that they were “produced using author‑directed A.I. tools.”

“Are you going to allow scammers to rip off your customers? The answer has to be no,” said Andy Hunter, the founder of Bookshop, an online book-selling platform that bills itself as an independent business alternative to Amazon.

But he worries there is no reliable way to fully block them. With more than 800,000 self-published books available for purchase on the site, it’s inevitable that some slip through the cracks.

If we’re talking about mostly self-published books, I can live with that much mediocrity.

In my column about AI I referenced the famous remark Truman Capote made about Jack Kerouac after he’d read “On The Road,” which Kerouac had famously composed on a typewriter equipped with a 120-foot roll of paper:

“That’s not writing, that’s typing!”

But I’ve often been tempted to shout at my Beloved Print Edition™ on a Saturday morning, where space on the page is limited, when instead of 800 words that have been fussed over and refined by a talented stylist, I see a transcript of a printed dialogue between Bret Stephens and Frank Bruni called “The Conversation” :

That’s not writing, that’s talking!

Even if it is typed on a keyboard.

But does anyone care? That’s the question. Apart from Philip Roth’s audience, who notices what writers work so hard to get right?

And, not for nothing, who comes to platforms like Substack for similar pleasures, or is it enough to just rant (I’m still looking at you, Steve Schmidt ).

Yes, absolutely, Bret Stephens is right. AI rots your brain and poisons your soul. You shouldn’t use it to express yourself. As he says,

Don’t use it for school papers, work briefs, letters to your in-laws, speeches at your company gathering or emails (however perfunctory) to your colleagues or friends. Don’t let it organize your notes. Don’t let it suggest an opening sentence, a segue or a closing paragraph. Don’t ask it to write a first draft and pretend that editing that draft somehow makes it your own. It doesn’t.

But let’s step back a bit. What value do we place on the written word? Who notices good writing? Who cares? What difference does it make?

Try this. Read The New York Times every day for a week. Buy a hard copy or go to the “Today’s Paper” button online. You can even see the front page. Turn the pages or follow through the International, National, Obituaries1, Arts and other sections.

Let yourself enjoy, and benefit from, good writing from sharp analysts and reporters.

And while you’re at it, read a good novel.

Song of the Day

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