Sometime between 1953 and 1954, Roald Dahl wrote a short story called “The Great Automatic Grammarist.” Its protagonist, Adolph Knipe, builds a machine that can “produce a five-thousand-word story, typed and ready to be sent, in thirty seconds.” The machine was fed “subjects” and then “wrote the sentences.” Knipe then approached the country’s most successful writers with a diabolical bargain: accept a lifetime payment, never write a word again, and let the machine publish under your name.
Most authors agree, especially the mediocre, the tired, and the once-famous but now-out-of-the-box. Younger and more talented writers resist, but eventually they too are forced to give in. Human authors disappear from the profession. Literature survives, but writers do not. Seventy years later, we are living within Dahl’s prophecy. Only now, the machine is called “artificial intelligence” (AI).
THE STRANGE PARADOX IN ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
Artificial Intelligence may seem to have democratized writing, but the truth is that it has industrialized mediocrity. Yes, today anyone can produce a good article. The grammar is flawless. The punctuation is neat. Spelling errors have disappeared. But with them has disappeared the kind of writing that could be called fresh, original, and provocative.
This is the strange paradox of the age of Artificial Intelligence: the disappearance of bad writing has also brought the decline of good writing. We are entering an era ruled by the law of averages, where everyone writes well enough, but the space for captivating writing is shrinking by the day. Writing is starting to feel eerily similar. Mistakes are gone, but with them the surprises. Sentences are precise, but also predictable. Language is polished, but pale and lifeless.
Great writing is born of experimentation. It often springs from risks, from failed attempts, from strange sentence structures that eventually become beautiful. If writers stop struggling with language because a machine immediately offers them perfect phrases, how will they discover their own voice? If someone never writes badly, how will they understand what good writing really is? That is the real danger.
THE DEATH OF ORIGINALITY
Artificial Intelligence thrives on patterns. It predicts what comes next based on what has come before. This makes it efficient, but at the same time inherently conservative, as well as predictable. As Dahl’s Knipe notes, machine writing “is governed by rules that are almost mathematical in their rigidity! Given the words and the meaning of what needs to be said, there is one and only one correct order in which those words can be placed.” This runs counter to the natural order of writing, which is not simply a grammatically correct arrangement of words, but rhythm, rebellion, and obsession. It belongs to the writer who breaks grammar for the sake of beauty, who invents words when existing ones don’t suffice, and who bends language until it reveals something new. It belongs to experimentation. And it is ruled by those who live and thrive in the gray areas of creation.
But AI prefers certainty. It flattens language, smooths edges, and eliminates discomfort. Combined with the obsession with political correctness and the fear of offending anyone, writing becomes confident and polished, but increasingly sterile.
This reminds me of one of my collaborators. Every time she sends me an article, she tells me that she wrote it herself and that she didn’t “polish” it with the help of Artificial Intelligence. She’s not a great writer, but every now and then she surprises me with a few sentences, with some ideas. She experiments, sometimes it works, many times it doesn’t. But I would choose an imperfect article, full of literary risks and grammatical errors, any day, than a technically perfect but emotionally empty text. Another challenge that Artificial Intelligence brings is originality. When you read an article today, you often ask yourself: whose voice is this, the author’s or the machine’s? As a researcher friend of mine recently told me, “I don’t know if what I’m reading is the author’s perspective or the computer’s. It’s a real challenge for us in the field of research and writing.”
THE PSYCHOLOGICAL COST OF “COMFORT”
The threat is not just artistic; it is also economic and psychological. As Naomi S. Baron warns in her book “Who Wrote This?”, writing is a process of discovery, through the writer’s creative effort and many failed variants. “If machines do our work for us, it is not clear how we will live. Even if universal income distribution becomes a reality, what happens to the psyche of the millions of people who derive self-esteem from work they love? Many of these jobs involve producing, editing, or translating written prose. I, for one, write because there are things I want to think about and share with others. Multiple variants are part of the process of discovery. I would hate to see these opportunities usurped,” she writes.
An even more dangerous aspect of what Baron calls “AI taming” is that, in the long run, we could become incapable of writing, especially good writing. Just as self-parking cars can make drivers forget how to parallel park, AI could gradually make people forget how to write. Many young people already struggle with long handwriting because they rarely use pen and paper. Their hands are not trained. AI risks furthering this decline, not only by weakening physical writing, but also mental writing. A civilization that cannot write will lose the ability to think independently. This is a terrifying scenario in every sense.
IS IT ALL OVER?
Hopefully, the situation is not completely out of control. Human beings have repeatedly surprised themselves with their survival instincts. However, today’s challenge looks different because the adversary is not overtly hostile. It has come as a friend. AI promises comfort, speed, efficiency, and ease. It offers help, not destruction. And that is precisely what makes it dangerous. The threat is invisible. It does not ask you to stop writing; it encourages you to stop trying. And perhaps the greatest crisis is not just the death of writing, but the death of reading. In an age where social media posts are confused with literature and publishers pursue viral social media fame more than intellectual depth, the thirst for serious reading is waning. When popularity replaces substance and appearance replaces thought, literature becomes performance, not research.
IF THERE ARE NO GOOD READERS, HOW WILL GOOD WRITERS BE BORN?
However, this is not an argument against technology. It is an argument against surrender. Use Artificial Intelligence as a tool, if you must, but never let it become your voice. Write badly, write slowly, write painfully, and rewrite, if necessary. Literature, after all, was never meant to be smooth and easy. It was meant to be rough, challenging, reflective, and, above all, human. Roald Dahl saw this long ago: the danger of machine writing for humans. If we lose writing, we don’t just lose good books. We lose the very ability to think. (bota.al)