S8E15: AI Is Not Good for Writing

When you receive a birthday or anniversary card, you often see two sets of writing: the elegantly worded section from the author at the card company, and a personal, handwritten note from the person giving you the card. Which part of the card carries more meaning for you? The handwritten note! While it may not be as elegantly worded as the printed message on the card, it carries a deeper weight because it brings a personal touch from someone that matters to you.

Can AI help us write with a personal touch? Or does it get in the way? Often, people argue that “AI can write it better than I can!” And while AI may produce something that sounds more polished more efficiently, we use AI for writing (even brainstorming or editing) at our peril.

To understand why, we need to look at what writing actually is. Writing was a technological advancement that made it possible to capture the human voice in a different medium that could be accessed by others in different times or places. This was an incredible technological advancement, and one that God inspired the authors of the Bible to use to write Holy Scripture. Words connected people to people.

Considered in this light, AI is a fundamentally different technological development than writing. Instead of serving as a medium for human communication, it displaces one of the human voices in the conversation. As Brett McCracken from The Gospel Goalition writes, “Writing is an art form and a labor of love. Love is something AI cannot do. Writing is a product of deeply human, necessarily inefficient processing, meandering, wrestling, noodling, cogitating, and often suffering. Suffering is something AI cannot do. For Christians, writing is a holy calling and an act of worship. Worship is something AI cannot do.”

The words we speak and write matter. In Matthew 12, Jesus soberly warns us against speaking careless words. And while AI may be able to help us write more quickly or with more polish, does it help us write with more care of the kind Jesus describes?

At work as in the rest of life, what matters about our writing isn’t how perfect it is, but how human it is. Ultimately, that’s good news for imperfect human writers and workers like us.

Sources:

Matthew 12:33-37 (ESV)