Writing Without a Writer – AI

I asked ChatGPT to write a 200-word blog post. Instead of producing one immediately, it first gave me a list of generic suggestions: write about what you’re learning, solve a problem, share a personal experience, and so on until it reached, presumably, two hundred words. I then clarified that I wanted it to write a post without any prompting from me. It took about fifteen seconds to respond, which may not seem significant, but for a moment, it felt as though it might not be able to carry out the request at all.

What it finally produced wasn’t poorly written, and the message itself was very reasonable. That said, it wasn’t particularly original. It gave me a message about action creating motivation and how consistency trumps all. For those who have followed my blogs, this is the exact theme of 4 a.m. Write Club. It’s also a topic that is discussed in nearly every self-help book you can find. Many of the habits I formed to write consistently with a busy schedule came from James Clear’s Atomic Habits.

That familiarity is the point. The post wasn’t wrong, but it wasn’t saying anything specific. It was safe, generalized, and broadly applicable. There weren’t any specific examples or anything fresh and insightful. Everything blended together like oatmeal from a McDonald’s drive-thru.

I wrote all that to say this: AI is not replacing authors and writers with something to say. This is a topic I briefly approached in my blog, Teacher’s Corner – Commas, but it’s worth further exploration. The same would go for any profession. In Digital Design, you would hire someone for their style and vision, whose years of experience provide insight that any layman would not understand.

Just as I needed to clarify my original request, humans still need to check for errors with any generative AI. This is why I’m still forced to mark answers wrong when students submit work produced by ChatGPT. Without proper context, AI cannot answer correctly. It is a tool, and like any tool, it can be used poorly by the person using it. While writing this blog, Grammarly has suggested many “fixes” that are incorrect. Without my advanced understanding of grammar, I would’ve blindly accepted its recommendations.

The future of writing will not come from an algorithm that may or may not be sentient, and not because such a thing is impossible or frightening, but because writing is valuable precisely due to lived experience. Humans write from memory, bias, failure, joy, routine, and contradiction. Our words are shaped by moments we didn’t choose and outcomes we couldn’t predict. That individuality is what makes writing worth reading. Even when the idea itself isn’t new, the perspective behind it is. AI can generate language, but it cannot account for a life. It does not experience time, consequence, or personal risk.

There will always be room for authors who have something to say about the human experience, no matter where we are with artificial intelligence. Writing, at the end of the day, is an exercise in empathy. AI may assist the process, but meaning still requires a mind shaped by living. That alone makes it worthwhile to keep writing.

(You can find more of James Clear’s work at https://jamesclear.com/)

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