Practice Writing Until You’re Better than AI

This is a note for college and high school students about writing well. I want to begin with the bad news: AI is better at writing than you are. But the skill threshold is pretty low, because AI has enormous shortcomings that it will never overcome. Therefore my thesis in what follows is that you need to practice writing just long enough that you are better than AI. This is the only way to guarantee that you’re a better writer than any idiot you find off the street.

Let’s start with a simple writer development curve, which I designed:

That purple line is how good AI is at writing, and it really isn’t bad. AI sentences make sense. AI provides clear examples to illustrate ideas. It grabs information from all over the place (we’ll just assume for the sake of argument that the information is accurate and fair). In my experience teaching writing at the college and graduate school level, AI writes competently at around a 10th grade level.

Because AI is freely available in every internet search engine, this means that anybody who can speak into a phone can write as well as AI. A three-year old who can hold down the RECORD button on a phone or tablet can produce a 500-word essay on the celestial planet Venus. Which means that any adult with the intelligence of a three-year-old can write as well as AI.

The big problem here, if you aren’t catching on, is that everybody between the intellectual ages of 3 and 16 can write at the same level. That competition is enormous. There is nothing extraordinary anymore about being a ten-year-old who writes at a 10th grade level, for instance. And all college students can at least write like a competent 16-year-old, provided they use AI.

And when I read essays written by students, one out of ten is nearly illegible: it just doesn’t make sense. 

Why AI Writing is Poor

There are two main problems with AI writing, even though it’s better than all that writing that doesn’t make sense. 1) AI Presents a view from nowhere and 2) AI cannot synthesize information.

AI has a View from NoWhere

You are a human being with a physical body and a culture into which you were born. This means that you have eyes and ears and a nose that can gather information and make observations. These observations belong to you. They are situated in your eyeballs and fingertips and so on. You encounter the world, and this encounter includes an experience. You’re not bumping up against water vapor molecules on a hot and humid day; you’re feeling weather that is (perhaps) heavy and oppressive. It makes a three-mile walk less appealing than it might be on a brisk fall morning.

When you describe your experience, other human beings connect with you by experiencing the same. That’s how we understand stuff like temperature and humidity: we imagine what it's like through your description of it.

AI can’t do this because it doesn’t have a body. It combines 1,000 such descriptions to create a sort of average description that loses its personal quality.

Your perspective has this personal quality, because you are a person. Your writing comes from a perspective—your perspective. I’ll write more on this later.

AI cannot Synthesize Information

I’ve noticed over the years a tendency for students to explain more and more that everything is relative. For instance, depression is a psychological disorder that requires a clinical intervention of drugs or psychotherapy, but for some it is no different than having a bad day or week and no intervention is necessary. The verdict: Depression is and isn’t a disorder that requires clinical intervention.

I have found myself asking these questions more and more, “So which one is it?” or “How is it possible for both to be true?” 

Answering these questions requires creative synthesis. You have to understand what is being asked, and how the two answers (Depression is and it isn’t a disorder) are correct depending on how, say, depression is being defined. 60 years ago Michael Polanyi called this “tacit knowledge,” which goes deeper than explicit knowledge. That’s something else I’ll have to write about in more detail at some point.

The summary here is that AI can only put a bunch of information together like cars on a train, where the end product is just a bunch of ideas strung along. Only humans can synthesize the information sort of like mixing flour and sugar and butter and eggs to make a cake. The cake (or pancakes or muffins etc.) is the synthesis. AI can only gather the ingredients and put them on your countertop. Any idiot or three-year-old could tell you that.

How To Be Better than AI

Well this is the question that has always been around about writing: how do I improve? You can improve by spending more time writing. But don’t just open a notebook and record your thoughts. Be systematic and intentional about it. Find an author you admire and try to figure out what it is you admire about them. What are they doing that you don’t. Practice writing like them. Eventually you want to discover your own writing voice. Practice. Read. Practice. Read.

Below are some articles I’ve already written on the topic:

• Author Henry Miller on Finding Your Writing Voice
• Learning to Write from the Right (Cerebral) Hemisphere
• Six-Part Series on the Contact - Withdrawal Cycle in Writing

And my favorite books:

• Kurt Vonnegut - Pity the Reader: On Writing with Style
• Strunk and White - The Elements of Style
• William Zinsser - On Writing Well