mechanical writing

Cory Doctorow:

A university professor friend of mine recently confessed that everyone in their department now outsources their letter-of-reference writing to ChatGPT. They feed the chatbot a few bullet points and it spits out a letter, which they lightly edit and sign.

Naturally enough, this is slowly but surely leading to a rise in the number of reference letters they’re asked to write. When a student knows that writing the letter is the work of a few seconds, they’re more willing to ask, and a prof is more willing to say yes (or rather, they feel more awkward about saying no).

The next step is obvious: as letters of reference proliferate, people who receive these letters will ask a chatbot to summarize them in a few bullet points, creating a lossy process where a few bullet points are inflated into pages of puffery by a bot, then deflated back to bullet points by another one.

But whatever signal remains after that process has run, it will lack one element: the signal that this letter was costly to produce, and therefore worthy of taking into consideration merely on that basis. 

See this post by me. 

I must admit that I hadn’t thought of this particular use of AI, but it raises an interesting question: When do we turn to AI for help with writing? — especially those of us who are competent writers? We don’t do it for every writing task, only for some — but which ones? 

Here’s my hypothesis: Competent writers seek help from AI when they’re faced with 

an obligation to write, in situations in which certain phrasal formulas are expected, and any stylistic vividness is useless or even unwelcome. 

Why write as a human being when humanity is a barrier to data processing?