I'm begging you to hold on to your imperfections

Our knobbly bits are the point; but tell that to the dyslexic person who can breathe again because of ChatGPT

A few weeks ago I read an essay by a young professional about why they loved the work that they do. It had an introduction in their own voice, and then it suddenly transformed into the bland, say-nothing-speak that I increasingly recognise as being AI-generated. I was taken aback by the starkness of the two contrasting texts. As an ex-higher education teacher, I immediately saw the dilemma, or at least the dilemma as I imagined it to be.

Perhaps English is your second language, or maybe you’re new to academic writing; maybe you’re studying literature when your first degree was in maths , or perhaps you’re dyslexic. Whatever your circumstances, the texts you’re being given to read are complex, full of unknown, specialist vocabulary and erudite-sounding language, and in a style that you have absolutely no idea how to emulate. You’ve been getting your essays back covered in spelling corrections, or with abstruse arrows pointing to other parts of the page, and comments that make no kind of sense at all.

It’s not a new problem, and I’m not going to go into the challenges facing educators and students now that AI seems to be everyone’s answer. What interested me here was that what I read was not an essay prepared for assessment, and the person wasn’t a student. I didn’t know the writer, or their situation, but I suddenly understood how tempting it must be if you feel underconfident about your written expression, or if you feel you haven’t received quite the right kind of education, or for any number of other reasons, to ‘just run your essay through AI to make sure it reads well’.

I imagined what a relief it would be not to have to worry about having made any glaring errors; how satisfying it would be to see the various thoughts that you’d had being neatly presented back to you into a form that expressed exactly what you’d been thinking, but perhaps more elegantly than you might have been able to express them.

My heart went out to the person. And then I felt some weird moral responsibility rise up in me which said that I was honour-bound to contact them and tell them that, much as I understood why they had done what they’d done, it was vitally important that they didn’t fall onto this path.

And so I did. I wrote, ‘I’m interested in this topic, and in your perspective. If I may offer a suggestion, and that is to write in your own words instead of using AI. The AI text tells me nothing at all’.

It really didn’t. It took a bunch of human ideas and feelings and it blandified them into an endless run of sentences that sounded romantic and clever, but which told me absolutely nothing at all. Nothing. Froth, blowing in the wind.

The person responded surprisingly well to this unasked for intrusion into their writing world, and we then had a discussion about ‘polishing’ things with AI, faltering confidence, and past bad experiences and criticisms of their own voice.

Strict teacher scaring the bejeezus out of students new to their field

This seems to be to be yet another example of how the easily availability of GenAI preys upon human frailities and vulnerabilities. Who hasn’t felt underconfident about their written expression at some point? Who hasn’t compared themselves to other, more experienced writers and felt dissatisfied with their own output? Who hasn’t regularly been appalled at their unique array of human weaknesses and imperfections and wished that they could somehow get rid of all the difficulties and challenges and struggles and setbacks and all their apparently insuperable inadequacies? The temptation to just wipe them all out with a simple instruction must be strong.

But if we do that? If we do that, everything that makes human life and culture what it is starts to erode.

The magic of imperfectly human creativity

People are writing more and more about the importance of human variation and imperfection; increasingly heartfelt pleas to rescue humanity from the effects of the shiny AI versions of everything which are increasingly colonising everything in the human world. Many of us now fear for human culture, human sanity, human development, human creation.

But I haven’t seen anyone talking about the temptations of GenAI for the millions of people who have been discriminated against by the outdated structural and educational norms found in many human societies. GenAI is beginning to make people consider what it is that’s valuable about human-created things, but it’s also offering a solution for many people to a range of educational and societal challenges which rarely get properly acknowledged.

I don’t want that young professional to tell me about his love of his subject using the glib platitudes of Claude or ChatGPT, I want to hear him tell me about it in his own words, in his own way, with all of his own linguistic and expressive idiosyncracies. But he’s locked into a system that has been criticising him all of his life; how can I expect him to listen to what I say?

I keep trying to find a way to articulate what a number of writers here have recently referred to as ‘friction’, and why it matters. The crucial role of struggle and difficulty, the necessity of getting lost when trying to pin down an idea; and the inevitability of feelings of frustration, even despair, while trying to find out what you’re thinking and what you want to say. This is what writing is, it’s the outcome of a process, hard won. Speeding up the process might seem attractive, but actually you’re filling your veins with formaldehyde. Your writing turns into a corpse.

I recognise it quickly now. I don’t need to go looking for the tells; the short sentences, the one sentence paragraphs, the - is not -, but - constructions. I feel it. Writing which, in some inexplicable way, has no connection to the lifeforce. I’m reading away, enjoying the ideas, and then suddenly I feel as if someone has thrown an old, dusty blanket over my head. I start to suffocate, starved of oxygen, choking on the carapaces of long dead dust-mites.

It seems that this situation is not just a matter of humans always looking for the easy way through; seeking what’s soft and comfortable, or wanting to attract admiration for longed-for achievements. There are huge, hierarchical, structural and educational issues, deeply embedded in so many people’s life experience, which have been the cause of a great pain to those people. The easy availability of GenAI writing assistants is pointing towards something that has been swept under the carpet for too long, and I don’t see anyone discussing it (of course they will be, but I haven’t seen it!).