Writing, Plato and AI

There is a great paradox, a frustrating paradox about the use of AI for writing. Why do we write? To express ourselves, to cultivate our thoughts to give them structure, clarity and perhaps elegance.  We write to share. It makes us often vulnerable. Writing is personal, it is intimate. It is also hard. The fact that we reach out so much towards artificial agents means that there is a systemic problem: we write for other reasons than the mentioned above. We write to get published, to receive grants, to sell. We do not write, we produce text to meet external requirements. To be efficient. I wish we would write more to express ourselves. I want the intimate, personal writing. I want to see others in writings.

Plato critizes the invention of  written speech in his dialogue Phaedros. It is one of my favorite dialogues.  The main reason was that he wanted lived speech – speech that is shared with others. The reasons, the logos, had to be shaped in a space where others could participate. Only such lived speech embedded in human space could have been loved, could move, could teach. Even though I disagree that the written speech is bad, I see how this criticism can be applied when written speech is co-written by AI.