Prompt Response

Sometimes it’s words flowing from your forehead so fast that you can barely get them down fast enough. Sometimes it’s staring at a blinking cursor and waiting for words that won’t come. Sometimes it’s reworking a single sentence again and again and again. You feel lost. You think you should’ve stopped rewriting 30 minutes ago. You wonder if maybe this isn’t for you, that writing is something that was fun when it was “cheap”, when you just wrote the first flow and called it done.

And then POP , you breakthrough. Like pushing through foliage and bursting out onto a sunny beach, you find what it was that you’ve been looking for. It was so simple. You were right on top of it all this time, tripping over it again and again without noticing.

But it wasn’t simple. The writing and reading and editing and thinking was the searching. Thinking is temporary - while you can work an idea in your head, it always seems to be dissolving on the edges like handfuls of sand. Writing your thoughts down distills them onto the page. You can begin to see your thoughts formed whole. You can see where they are well constructed, and where they are not. You can assess where more work needs to be done, and what that work might be.

Linda Flower and John Hayes found that writing is a cognitive process - we work between planning, composing, and reviewing recursively. Where previous research believed that writing was a linear process, they found that writing was nonlinear: an iterative process where composition could lead to planning to review and back again. We actually learn about what we are writing as we are writing it - by accessing long-term memory, by researching as we go, and most importantly by writing ourselves into ideas we didn’t realize we had.

Writing as thinking is why you feel the slow release when journaling, why a group working on a problem look for pen and paper, and why the tenth draft is so much better than the first draft. In the thinking and planning and composing and reviewing, you burrow into the piece itself, digging into your thinking and building and rebuilding the logic up around you. The time spent is why it is worth reading - the reader gets to stand inside what you’ve built.

Stephen King in his book On Writing describes writing as a form of telepathy. A writer can sit in a place and time and distill their perception for someone to come along later in a different time and place and live in it. But what is the experience of being human like? What are we actually distilling? Per Antonio Damasio, our consciousness arises from what we feel which ultimately comes from our embodied experience - our perception originates in the brain and the body. If the universe that we create in our minds is all the nerve endings and chemical signaling and synapse firings, then you have to live there to know what it’s like. To appreciate the message, to read between the lines, to understand the sub-context, you have to read and write within the context of human conversation.

Writing for an audience means taking responsibility. As author and writing professor Amy Mathews puts it: “There is an invisible, unspoken contract: the reader expects the author and text to hold true to this contract, even though the terms can be shifting, misunderstood, manipulated and even unacknowledged.” What you write defines the terms of the contract. In a technical manual, the duty is to be clear and concise and specific. Nobody reads a manual looking for a person on the other side. But in a personal essay, the reader is looking for someone to be there. The writer’s duty is to be open and honest and often vulnerable, to share their interior experience of the world.

For some, the ideas come to them, but not the composition. In these cases, writers can be hired to compose, and both people share a byline. As the reader, we know we are reading one person’s ideas and another person’s words. The contract is honored.

To write a personal essay with AI is to violate three parts of the contract with the reader. To use a ghostwriter without a byline is dishonest. To use software to write about the embodied human experience is disingenuous. To produce a piece of personal reflection without having done the work to reflect is to sell a building you never owned. To quote Pope Leo XIV: “So-called artificial intelligences do not undergo experiences, do not possess a body, do not feel joy or pain, do not mature through relationships and do not know from within what love, work, friendship or responsibility mean.”

AI can write you 1,200 words on what it's like to watch the sun rise with a warm cup of coffee, but it doesn't actually know what that is like. You do. You've felt the night's numbness give way to the chill of the morning. You've felt the "new blood" of having just woken up. You've smelled the roast of the coffee, felt the slow warmth of the liquid behind the quick coolness of a ceramic cup. You've tasted the warmth and bitterness, and felt the hope of a new day.

Pristine paragraphs stream from LLMs, like technology in molded white packaging. Sterile, with clean lines and sharp edges, yet slightly askew. AI cannot know what it’s like to be human. It can only produce Potemkin prose, the mimicry of a hundred thousand writers. To quote Robin Williams’ character from Good Will Hunting : “If I asked you about love you’d probably quote me a sonnet, but you’ve never looked at a woman and been totally vulnerable”.

What do you hope to represent by using AI to write for you? Do you hope that people read it and think you are a writer? That they will acknowledge the time you spent thinking and composing and reviewing? And when they read your words and then write you a note to tell you how great your writing is, what will you feel? Will you feel that flare of human connection, the satisfaction of a moment shared between two people? Or will you feel like a fake?