What AI Teaches Us About Good Writing

When it lacks instructions to imitate a particular voice, it presumably imitates all of us, averaging our voices together into an indistinct default. Conversing with the chatbot feels like encountering someone you recognize but have never met — a voice of the masses, distant yet familiar.

Indeed, the fact that AI, which is trained to detect and replicate underlying patterns in our writing, can produce such coherent prose is a testament to just how much we rely on convention, both at the sentence and structural level.

But the technology’s capacity for imitation will likely continue to improve: New Yorker staff writer Kyle Chayka observed that ChatGPT was not very effective at mimicking his own writing voice, but the AI startup, Writer, created a bot trained on his own writing to produce text in his voice that, while not perfect, was still “unnervingly effective.

something critical is missing from its voice: a certain sense of connection. At its core, writing is about creating intimacy between writer and reader. It’s a relational act, not a one-sided performance, and its power is in the exchange of ideas. It’s the closest we can get to inhabiting the mind of another human, the closest to escaping our own eg

Writers who use AI as a drafting tool might be seen as intentionality remixers, drawing copy from ChatGPT as raw material and weaving purpose into the syntax and language. But so far, the chatbot on its own, or even with the support of savvy prompt engineering, does not excel at this particular task.

The Value Of Human Error

language is a lens, and our thoughts and perceptions are almost certainly shaped in some way by its conventions and metaphors. It shows us that writing influences our thoughts even as we use it to describe them.

We tend to admire writing whose predominant feature is experimentalism, but readability seems to matter to us, too — how great can a piece of writing be if few have the capacity or inclination to finish it?

a certain energy exchange, a sense of connection across individual minds, a balance of surprise and familiarity.