Writing with Machines

I’ve noticed a pattern.

When most people see Lex, the AI-powered word processor we launched last week, they have one of two reactions:

The first is, “Wow, this is cool! I want this to do all my writing for me.”

The second is, “Wow, this is horrible! Any writing produced by an AI is obviously terrible and no one should waste their time reading it. You have built something that destroys the arts.”

Both reactions miss the point. Large language models like GPT-3—the AI that currently powers Lex—are not going to replace writers in any meaningful sense. Sure, they might generate some copy that gets published somewhere, but they lack the active ingredient of writing: a human being who has something they feel is important to say. The less connection a set of words have to revealing something about a real human being’s intent, the less point there is to reading them.

It might seem like you could just describe the general parameters of what you want the AI to talk about and have that be “enough” intent to make the writing succeed, but I’m not so sure. Writing is thinking, and every word has meaning. Some forms of writing are higher stakes and require more craft than others, but all writing has to matter to at least one reader for it to have any value. It’s hard for me to imagine purely AI-generated writing mattering much to many people outside a few specialized use cases, due to the fundamental lack of intent an AI can have.

But that doesn’t mean that AI is worthless to writers. In fact, I believe AI is forever going to change the way people write almost everything. It’s just that the way this will happen is different than it seems.

Take, for example, this essay. I’m writing it using Lex. Before I started composing this paragraph I typed “+++” to see what the AI would suggest based on everything that came before. It generated something about how humans would do what they do best and no longer construct individual sentences, but instead would convey the main ideas and let the machines execute them at a lower level. I happen to completely disagree with this, but it was helpful nonetheless. It got me thinking about specialization and gains from trade. It got me thinking about efficiency. It helped show me an important related concept, even if it got the details wrong.

Specifically, it led me to this thought: I think humans will still craft individual sentences for a long time. But I also think that we will lean on AI to help remind us of related ideas that we might not consider. What humans do best is see information in our environment, synthesize it, and connect it with related ideas in novel ways. But it’s much harder for us to come up with something out of nothing. It helps a lot to have something to react to.

In psychology this principle is called “priming,” and it’s a well-studied phenomenon.