Why AI Can’t Truly Write
If people bring so much courage to this world the world has to kill them to break them, so of course it kills them. The world breaks every one and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry.
AI could never write this. This passage is from Hemingway, and it will always be from Hemingway. He was writing and thinking and pondering while jotting down this passage for the first time. He was probably sitting on a cobbled French road, sipping a coffee after a night of boxing. He was bruised, but not broken. He would look up and see the couple he always wished he could be strolling down the Parisian road together, arm in arm. That woman biked to work, he presumed, again, with her hair billowing and blowing in the morning breeze. Her bell to alarm people of her presence and subsequently of her hurriedness would enter from his left ear as a bell and exit from his right ear as a different tone as her biked wheezed its way across the cobblestones. He looked at the fountain he always admired, see the faint inscriptions of the soldiers who died in who knows what European war. Then he would look back down, and write about why nature couldn’t allow those men to live beyond the battle where death had dragged them out of the light.
Of course, this is probably not what happened. I know that Hemingway was in Paris and did box, but when or where or why he wrote this passage doesn’t truly affect the truth in it. Hemingway was a human, and wrote about the human experience. Even though people like me may have to read the passage a few times to digest it, the inherent humanity of his writing is evident and that is why it touches so deep.
AI is an incredible actor. Many a man has already applauded its skills, while some troubled men believe its passionate show of love is real (recommend reading up on the man who proposed to ChatGPT…). But an actor is an actor, no matter how dedicated to their task. AI will never be human. It will write like us, and write eloquent novellas on love and war. It will capture the emotions of grief and pain. It will harness our hearts to follow on a journey it is stitching together from pervious human work. But it will never be human.
What is more important: what something says or what something means? AI may say these beautiful and gorgeous thoughts on the human experience, but there is no thought behind those robotic keystokes. Hemingway might have trashed his first attempt at the passage above, and it might’ve said nothing. But it meant everything, even if not well portrayed.
So writing is inherently human. Don’t give up on it to seek ease. I have leaned to heavily on AI in order to allow myself more time to finish that YouTube video, play that game, driving myself more and more into a pit of humanlessness as an AI takes up my mantle and tries its best to play me in its extravagant play. But it can’t. And it never can. Humans are made to be humans, so feel free to be one.