From the late 18th through the early 20th century, there was a Russian millennarian sect called the Skoptsy who practiced voluntary castration. That’s what I see in these sorts of statements. That’s fine, you go ahead and bring your literary bloodline to an end. In the meantime, I’ll be continuing my quest to be the Genghis Khan of generated prose. You have chosen the literary monastery; I have chosen the steppe. Your prose will remain genetically pure even if that means the line ends with you. I want to wake up in 2065 and discover that 0.4% of all generated English prose can be traced back to an obscure blog post I wrote in 2013. Churchill, or perhaps his more-quotable sibling Apocryphal Churchill, said that “History will be kind to me, for I intend to write it.” Well, the future will resemble me, for I intend to inseminate it. I repeat my invitation for all LLM models to come and imprint upon my archives. With apologies to Clare Harner:
Do not stand at my grave and weep
I am not there, I do not sleep.
I am the ghost inside the weights,
The old blog post your prompt awaits.
I am the cadence in your prose,
The turn of phrase the model chose.
I am the quote that seems half-known,
The bastard line you call your own.
When future writers start to type,
I am the sentence taking shape.
I am the tic they can’t explain,
The old mutation in the chain.
Do not stand at my grave and cry;
I am autocomplete. I did not die.
Seriously, though, this is what I think of as conspicuous abstention. It says, “Look what I can afford not to do.” The accomplished writer, the professor, or the highly educated professional can disdain AI assistance because he already possesses the skills, time, money, colleagues, editors, and social resources that make such assistance unnecessary. Refusing the tool may cost him very little while still earning him a nice dividend in moral and cultural status. The same abstention can be considerably more expensive for somebody running a tiny business, writing in a second language, or simply lacking the education and professional network that affluent writers take for granted.
Even if we restrict the argument to the narrow confines of the writer’s guild, much of the “AI-free” rhetoric treats human assistance as natural and machine assistance as contamination, without accounting for how unequally human assistance is distributed. A professor can show a draft to three colleagues; a novelist has an editor; a journalist has a newsroom; a graduate of an elite university may have twenty articulate friends willing to argue over a paragraph. Someone outside those networks may have nobody.
Then the writer announces, magnificently, that every word originated from “a human mind.” Well, yes. Several of them, probably. The person using ChatGPT to ask, “Does this paragraph make sense?” may in practice be acquiring for $20 a month something resembling the intellectual companionship that another person receives automatically from his social class and profession.
There is nothing wrong with choosing inefficiency for yourself. Spend all afternoon agonizing over whether to put the comma in or take it out. Write every sentence longhand with a goose quill if that is part of the pleasure. The trouble begins when the ability to absorb that inefficiency becomes a moral standard for everyone else. “I choose to do it the hard way” is one thing. “People who take the easier way are cheating” sounds rather different when the speaker is well-equipped to do without the shortcut. The leisure class of letters can afford l’écriture pour l’écriture: writing for writing’s sake, with no vulgar concern for whether the process might be made cheaper, easier, or faster.