The Tense of Writing

From drawing scribbles on walls of a non-descript cave to writing on leaves using a bird's feather to writing using a typewriter to writing on a computer screen - human writing tools have continuously evolved but none of them come close to the latest writing tool - AI. AI is not there for you to write - AI is writing for you and herein comes a need for deep reflection on authenticity of the world that would be presented to us and the posterity, in years to come, by AI writing.

Recently, I came across several posts on LinkedIn describing how one can identify an “AI writing”. This article, thus, emanates from the laments of some well-meaning folks who think AI has made everyone a writer, poet, essayist, sonneteer and whatever one can become if they knew how to write. ?It is true – AI has and will continue to make folks appear smarter – at least online.

Yet, there is a way with which one can still identify a human effort in writing from AI writing without going into the technicalities. The way would come naturally to those who have raised themselves on healthy diet of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Essays in the Art of Writing (in which appeared the bold statement - “style is synthetic”) to Mark Forsyth’s The Elements of Eloquence, which starts with “Shakespeare was not a genius” and other such books. It would come naturally to those who have written fiction, essays, or sonnets—or delved into the intricate rhetoric of Hindi, Sanskrit, or their own mother tongue. Style is indeed synthetic. One can learn the tropes of language and rhetoric – get fixated on a favourite few [like Charles Dickens’ love for alliteration or Magha’s love for sarvatobhadra or Shakespeare’s love for almost every rhetoric device that there is] – and then express themselves – and herein lies the key – the expression.

The human expression is cumbersome. It is messy. It doesn’t follow a fixed device or roadmap. One essayist might present the solution first and problem later and have it laden with case studies across the essay whereas other might start with plethora of case studies depicting problems and then present the solution, and what not. Sometimes, same essayist will adopt two very different styles of writing unbeknownst to themselves. Essentially, the expression or the [un]structure of it is what makes a writing human. We usually present the ideas – in almost same mess as they exist in our mind and in same emotions too.

You might sit down to linearise the narrative but still it would not be perfect – it can never be. It is because - human writing has a personality. One can easily identify Dinkar or Kavi Bhushan – just by reading their poems. This is the reason why works of good writers are singular – laden with a certain personality. They speak from places no machine can access: the recesses of memory, the tangle of emotion, and the effort to make sense of the world.

AI has a way of making writing appear neutral – essentially having no personality. The absence of personality is so stark that the abyss that is left in the writing is quite visible. The first paragraph of an AI writing lacks a personal anecdote, an emotion, or a vivid memory that can make the narrative that follows come alive. A lot of writing is churning of memory – of events happened [or happening], lessons learnt [or being learnt] and emotions felt [or being felt].

The absence of connection between experience and expression is far too visible in AI-writing [even the one that is prompted properly].

?At their heart, all forms of art—from writing poems to sculpting statues to composing music—are rooted in a particular skill. It takes a deeply personal lens on that skilled man’s deeply personal world and them rebelling against it or revering it; that skilled man can transform into a guitarist from a skilled guitar player or a sculptor from someone skilled at using chisel. Every art is either an act of rebel or reverence by the artist and so is every act of writing by a writer. Art is skill mixed with contemplations, feelings of rebel or reverence, and a motivation to give that feeling a separate existence – like a poem that started from a memory with feeling of rebel or reverence, flowed through the artist, finally rested on a medium.

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