"Will Writing Survive A.I?" is one of the more terrible headlines I've read recently (NYT, "Will Writing Survive A.I.? The Media Startup Every Is Betting on It," May 21, 2025).
A.I. is built on people's writing. You can continue to generate new content using deep learning, but if you're not continually refreshing that content with high quality up-to-date writing then you're going to end up stuck in a kind of stultifying time warp.
I think a more compelling question we might ask in the current moment: What kind of writing will survive A.I.? Because if there is one thing that A.I. generated content shows us, it is that not all writing is created equal. If a bot can create something presumably equal to the human version of it, is that maybe because the human version of it is vapid or stale?
Now seems like great time to build on the work of those--educators and others--who have been asking these questions for a long time. One example: is the traditional seminar paper useful for student learning? The traditional paper emphasizes product over process, and I think many of us--especially those with backgrounds in writing pedagogy--have long resisted it for this reason. Many people have been experimenting, for years, with new ways of thinking through how to teach critical thinking in the classroom--through stages, through reading, writing, and speaking, etc.--and how to find ways for students to develop and expose what they learn without overemphasizing that moment of "handing in" a final product.
The same question--What kind of writing will survive A.I.?--might be applied to other areas as well. If, as I have now heard anecdotally many times over, A.I. can generate a recommendation letter that rivals what professors typically write, then maybe the recommendation letter isn't doing the work that it once did. Maybe many recommendation letters are stale (are they closely read?; are they doing what we think they ought to be doing?; have they become possibly somewhat pointless?), and maybe there are new ways to think through both the reasoning behind them, the why, and alternatives to traditional methods.
I am uncertain about many things, but whether or not writing will survive A.I. is something I have no doubt about. Because thinking will survive A.I. and writing is, among other things, a way of thinking. It is also, often, a pleasure to write, in and of itself, and then to feel like you have made into some shape the thing that was, before that, inside of you, without form.
Hannah Arendt said something related to this final point, in a 1964 interview with Günter Gaus. It's a quotation that has been taped to my wall, just beside my desk, for a few years now. It's part of the loss behind the question posed in the article headline--a loss nobody seems to want to acknowledge. That is, the sense of satisfaction that comes from generating certain kinds of writing:
"I want to understand. And when others understand in the same sense as I understood, then it gives me satisfaction, like a sense of being at home [heimat]."