De redactie van NRC selecteert de beste artikelen uit The Economist voor een breder perspectief op internationale politiek en economie.
The perils of machine-made prose.
Dit artikel komt uit The Economist
If The Economist had just two loyalties, they might well be to good prose and creative destruction. Those seldom previously came into conflict—until artificial-intelligence models began writing. Now, AI text is winning literary awards, occupying op-ed pages and, as we report this week, filling the mouths of politicians. One in ten words spoken in Britain’s parliamentary debates, and one in seven in America’s House of Representatives, are probably drafted by AI.
When it comes to the written word, no writer is a neutral party. This newspaper has applauded technological progress for nearly two centuries. It would be churlish to turn Luddite only now, once the wolves of automation have turned up at our own door. And yet. Both writers and readers should be wary of passing the pen to AI.
De redactie van NRC selecteert de beste artikelen uit The Economist voor een breder perspectief op internationale politiek en economie.
Admittedly, in some sorts of writing an AI takeover would be welcome: customer-service complaints, say, or technical write-ups where clarity is all. What matters in such cases is disclosing the use of AI and making sure that the human being whose name is on the page still takes responsibility. Writers of all sorts would be doing their readers a disservice if they did not use AI models for research, proofreading and, when appropriate, feedback.
Elsewhere, however—in novels, speeches and even news articles—surrendering human authorship would be a mistake. For the time being, the most popular gripe about AI writing is the clumsiness of the prose itself. That complaint rests on shaky foundations. The Luddites grumbled, once, about the poor workmanship of machine-made stockings. But then the stockings got better. Doubtless, AI sentences will, too.
Any serious case against AI writing must rest, therefore, on the ways that words are not stockings: how they carry meaning and significance beyond what ends up on the page. The act of writing tends to be painful, even for many of those who do it for a living. But much of that pain is really the pain of thinking, of crystallising thoughts in text. Sidestepping that is a sure-fire route to less rigorous, let alone original, human thought. Students who outsource their essays to Claude may lose the habit of reasoning. Politicians who let AI craft their arguments may be less mindful of their consequences.
Another big concern is with the consumers of the written word—or readers, as they are better known. AI writing breaks the expectations of a literate culture. Human text takes longer to write than to read. This offers a certain guarantee if not of quality—the world still swims in dire prose—then at least of effort. Someone, somewhere, thought something was worth saying. Economists call that a costly signal.
Whatever French theorists have to say about the death of the author, readers still want to know that a person wrote the words in front of them. Take poetry. Even a few years ago, when AI was less powerful, researchers were already finding that many people, in blind tests of AI- and human-written poetry, preferred the robo-rhymes. But making sense of a poem relies on the promise that a human wrote it, and thus that it meant something to someone.
Even when AI is not used, it can sully readers’ experiences. They may stumble on a turn of phrase that sounds suspiciously machine-made, and give up on reading the rest of the text. Or the proliferation of AI-generated fakery may make them distrust real news. Polluting the information environment like that is what economists call an externality.
Technology will remake many of these norms. AI offers immense opportunities, too, many of which no one can yet fully grasp. Yet liberal societies negotiate these momentous changes not by passively surrendering to technologies, but by adapting to them. The printing press set off religious wars in early-modern Europe. In the 1930s the radio heralded fascism. Few associate either with such high drama today. Societies are grappling with plenty of other technologies that pose risks, such as fattier foods and more potent illegal drugs.
So it would be hubristic to try to chart out exactly how societies ought in future to approach the use of AI in writing. But any writer knows to start with a first draft. This is ours.
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