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When AI enters the chat, the writer goes missing
The ease of mechanically generated writing does more than dull our creativity – it leaves the words without an owner.
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By deferring to AI, we are limiting the range of our thoughts to the archives of what has been written before, says the writer.
ST ILLUSTRATION: MANNY FRANCISCO
Gwee Li Sui
The march of artificial intelligence appears to sound the death knell for writers. It seems inevitable that all literary writing will one day be outsourced to AI, with humans merely playing the roles of prompters and editors. Until that point, some imagine it sustainable to be AI-assisted while producing works that are still defensibly independent.
We writers, to be sure, have experienced the “death of the author” before. It is a phrase made famous by the mid-20th century thinker Roland Barthes and describes how the final authority for meaning in a work shifts from the writer to the reader. So extra-textual information, such as a writer’s life and intentions, is irrelevant to whatever cogent sense a reader derives from a text.
