Nobody Writes Alone

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Magazine editors and literary critics now treat artificial intelligence as a threat to human thought, and many have banned it from their pages. Their outrage rests on a romantic picture of how writing gets made. In this picture a solitary genius sits in a quiet room, stares at a blank sheet and pours out five thousand words of finished prose from memory alone. That writer has never existed. The defense of pure, unassisted writing does not protect literature or clear thinking. It protects a guild’s monopoly on production.

Literary history shows that great books and essays have always come out of workshops. In 1980 Gordon Lish took Raymond Carver’s stories, cut about half the words (more than seventy percent in some stories) and rewrote several endings before What We Talk About When We Talk About Love went to the printer. Ezra Pound cut T.S. Eliot’s draft of The Waste Land nearly in half. F. Scott Fitzgerald persuaded Ernest Hemingway to drop the first fifteen pages of The Sun Also Rises at the galley stage. At The New Yorker a staff writer works for months on a single piece, and then an editor, a fact-checker and a team of copy editors go through every line before a reader sees it. The cover carries one name, but many hands built the work.

Critics also assume that thinking happens only when fingers hit a keyboard in silence. History proves them wrong again. In the Phaedrus, Socrates argues that writing will weaken human memory and that true thought lives in spoken dialogue. In 1882 Friedrich Nietzsche, his eyesight failing, bought a Malling-Hansen writing ball and noted that our writing tools shape our thoughts. After the Second World War, Winston Churchill wrote his history of the war by pacing the carpet at night and dictating to a secretary, while a team of assistants laid out naval records and wartime telegrams for him to work from. In the morning Churchill took a pen to the typed sheets and sharpened the rhythm. Thinking happens in speech, in questioning a document and in testing an argument out loud as much as it happens at a silent desk.

Every time a new tool lowers the cost of craft, the old guard answers with moral panic. In the early 2000s film photographers insisted that anyone who had not spent long hours in a darkroom breathing chemical fumes was a fraud. Digital cameras arrived and thousands of amateurs flooded the market on automatic mode, and within a few years the market sorted itself out. A digital sensor could set the exposure and save a working photographer hundreds of hours waiting on a lab, but the camera still did not know where to stand. It could not see light, timing or human expression. The button-pushers drifted away, the darkroom purists lost ground and the photographers who understood composition used the new tools to do the best work of their careers.

The same sorting is underway in writing and analysis. A writer who uses a machine to paste generic, unresearched text onto the internet insults the reader and dulls his own mind. A writer who uses it as a research desk and a drafting room does the opposite. He can search primary sources and balance sheets, test a premise in spoken argument and assemble rough material to cut and shape. The machine takes the mechanical work, and he gets the time to read more books, check more facts and ask harder questions.

William Zinsser argued that the point of non-fiction is to move a clear thought from one mind to another without clutter or vanity. A carpenter is judged by whether the table stands level and holds weight for fifty years, and nobody asks whether he refused the power saw.

The tool does not make the writer honest or lazy. The mind directing the work decides whether the table stands straight.

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