Saturday, March 8, 2025
Enjoyed John Warner’s new book, “More Than Words: How to Think About Writing in the AI.” A writer and teacher (and a former McSweeney’s editor), Warner has beliefs and ideals, but he’s not a scold, or an alarmist. With good humor a clear-eyed sense of the positive uses of technology, he describes how ChatGPT — which he calls “automated text,” not “artificial intelligence” — encourages the circumvention of the nourishing, difficult work of both writing and reading. And what ChatGPT’s doing is not writing, he points out; it’s syntax. And he’s here in these pages to celebrate what’s lasting and human about real writing.
“What I want to say about writing is that it is a fully embodied experience. When we do it, we are thinking and feeling. We are bringing our unique intelligences to the table and attempting to demonstrate them to the world, even when our intelligences don’t seem too intelligent.
ChatGPT is the opposite, a literal averaging of intelligences, a featureless landscape of pattern-derived text.
Why have we declared this a marvel when there’s an infinite supply of greater marvels all around us?”