21-05-2025
The Case For Human Writing
John Warner's book about writing
Hatchette Book Group
In the book 'More Than Words,' writer-educator John Warner makes the case for renewing the concept of writing as a fundamentally human activity.
Large Language Model bots like ChatGPT offer not intelligence, but automation, he argues. Generative intelligence promises 'to turn text production into a commodity.' ChatGPT does not read or think or understand language, but renders words as tokens on which it performs complex math. 'When ChatGPT strings together its tokens in the form of syntax, it is not wrestling with an idea. It is arranging language.'
Warner's concerns go deeper than LLM's huge and its frequent public mistakes, like the newspaper insert that just last week, included by major newspaper, recommending books that have never been written and cited people who don't exist (as reported by real humans Damon Beres and Charlie Warzel at The Atlantic). Nor does Warner simply argue that we must circle the wagons and repel the cyber-invaders.
Warner has argued before that much of what LLMs will destroy deserves to be destroyed. We should, he argues, take the advent of chatbots as 'an opportunity to reconsider exactly what we value and why we value those things."
Trends in education have taught generations a devalued view of writing (and reading as well). Warner observes that we are on our second or third generation 'of students who experience school not as an opportunity for learning, but a grim march through proficiencies, attached to extremely high stakes, stakes often measured by tests that are not reflective of genuine learning.' The result that he has seen in his own classrooms are students who have been 'incentivized to not write but instead to produce writing related simulations.' In education, writing has become performance rather than communication, and if we want students to simply follow a robotic algorithm to create a language product--well, that is exactly the task that a LLM is well-suited to perform.
Why not put words to their best use-- to communicate human thoughts and feelings, ideas and emotions that one person intentionally tries to convey to another human being?
After examining the depths and details of the challenge, Warner does offer some hope and advice in the final section of the book: resist, renew, and explore.
Warner encourages us to resist 'technological determinism,' the argument that AI is inevitable and therefore we should neither resist or regulate it, as well as the huge hype, the manufactured sense that this is the future and you must get on board. Warner also points out the constant tendency to anthropomorphize AI, even though it is a machine that does not think, understand, or empathize, folks are constantly projecting those qualities onto the AI.
Warner encourages renewing the sense of and appreciation for the human. And he calls on readers to explore their understanding of the field, in particular finding guides, people who have invested the time and study and thought to provide deeper insights into this growing field.
I asked Warner what he thought had changed since he'd wrapped up the book. 'It's really just an intensification of the stuff I cover in the book' he said. 'The hype is greater. The threat of giving ourselves over to these things is greater.'
The book is an impassioned argument for the value of human language. At one point Warner responds to the notion that AI somehow improves on human work, noting that LLMs are machine. 'To declare the machines superior means believing that what makes humans human is inherently inferior." To those who argue that chatbots teamed up with humans will be able to create more, better, faster writing, Warner says no.
'I'll tell you why not. Because ChatGPT cannot write. Generating syntax is not the same thing as writing. Writing is an embodied act of thinking and feeling. Writing in communicating with intention. Yes, the existence of a product at the end of the process is an indicator that writing has happened, but by itself, it does not define what writing is or what it means to the writer or the audience for that writing.'
'More Than Words' is a bracing and encouraging defense of the human in creation and communication. It's a valuable read for anyone who works with students, values reading and writing, or wishes for an antidote to the constant AI hucksterism of the moment.
