I regularly read John Warner’s newsletter “The Biblioracle Recommends”. I thoroughly enjoy his takes on reading and writing there. So, when he started mentioning a book he was working on about the intersection of AI and writing, I was intrigued. I bought a copy on the day of release (4 February 2025) and recently finished reading it.
Warner is a former college writing teacher and currently a columnist for the Chicago Tribune. His book addresses the concern that many have of how the growth of generative AI tools (like ChatGPT) may affect writing and how it is taught. In short, the author’s view is that we are looking at the question the wrong way. In fact, he says that AI can’t read or write. Sure, it produces text through an automated guessing process that churns out grammatically correct text. But that isn’t writing. Only humans can read and write. About the concern of using ChatGPT in education: “Students using ChatGPT to complete assignments that don’t mean anything to them and seem unconnected to learning is only sensible. This is not a character defect of students but the sign of a bad disconnect between schooling and learning.”
The other main idea that I really connected with is that writing is a process not an output. “The economic style of reasoning [that stresses efficiency above all else] crowds out other considerations—namely, moral ones. It privileges the speed and efficiency with which an output is produced over the process that led to that output. But for we humans, process matters. Our lives are experienced in the world of process, not outputs.” Human beings aren’t efficient. Trying to make them so turns us into machines and automatons. This book is well written and essential reading in today’s world.
My rating: 5/5