What AI Teaches Us About Good Writing

Writers who use AI as a drafting tool might be seen as intentionality remixers, drawing copy from ChatGPT as raw material and weaving purpose into the syntax and language. But so far, the chatbot on its own, or even with the support of savvy prompt engineering, does not excel at this particular task.

Good character impressions delight us because they illuminate something fundamental about the person they imitate

By design, the program relapses to a rhetorical median, its deviations mechanical whereas ours are organic.

simply abiding by the rules doesn’t make excellent writing — it makes conventional, unremarkable writing, the kind usually found in business reports, policy memos and research articles.

But because it has no intention, it can’t be purposeful in how it adheres to or strays from the rules. Its arguments are built not from critical thought, but from predictive phrase sequences — it doesn’t “know” what its passages are really about, only that their words tend to occur together, so it lacks the meta-cognitive awareness needed to select

Indeed, the fact that AI, which is trained to detect and replicate underlying patterns in our writing, can produce such coherent prose is a testament to just how much we rely on convention, both at the sentence and structural level.

The Value Of Human Error

something critical is missing from its voice: a certain sense of connection. At its core, writing is about creating intimacy between writer and reader. It’s a relational act, not a one-sided performance, and its power is in the exchange of ideas. It’s the closest we can get to inhabiting the mind of another human, the closest to escaping our own eg

But what is general knowledge in a world where virtually any information is freely accessible online?

ChatGPT is a collective voice, not a specific one, and so even as the algorithm improves, we will likely continue to find its writing emotionally inadequate