What AI Teaches Us About Good Writing

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

When it lacks instructions to imitate a particular voice, it presumably imitates all of us, averaging our voices together into an indistinct default. Conversing with the chatbot feels like encountering someone you recognize but have never met — a voice of the masses, distant yet familiar.

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.

language is a lens, and our thoughts and perceptions are almost certainly shaped in some way by its conventions and metaphors. It shows us that writing influences our thoughts even as we use it to describe them.

It’s difficult to determine a text’s quality without considering the context in which it was written.

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

Reading ChatGPT’s writing feels uncanny because there’s no driver at the wheel, no real connection being built*.*

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

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