People keep hurling accusations of AI-assisted writing as though it’s the new literary scarlet letter. Apparently, if a sentence lands too cleanly or an argument isn’t held together with chewing gum and vibes, someone’s bound to whisper that silicon fingers were involved. It’s all very witch-trial chic.
Video: My minion scribing this blog post. I want to teach it how to use a typewriter.
I’ve written about this on Philosophics. Not the tired panic about ‘machines stealing our jobs’, nor the hand-wringing about entry-level writers having their ladders kicked away. That’s a separate tragedy. My post digs into the moral melodrama over authorship itself, where a whiff of algorithmic contribution is treated like doping at the Olympics. As if writing were a pole-vault and not, you know, communication.
The whole spectacle reveals more about our Enlightenment hang-ups than about the technology. We still cling to this myth that pure, unadulterated human genius trickles from the fingertips of a lone, caffeinated scribe. Anything less than “authenticity” gets branded synthetic, corrupt, impure. It’s the same script modernism’s been peddling forever, only now the villain has LEDs.
Anyway, if you’ve got the stomach for a short polemic on why these accusations miss the point entirely, here it is:
Yes, I actually said that. Possibly whilst caffeinated.
I was chatting with a mate about book sales, and it slipped out: I’d rather get reviews than sales. Not that I’d turn down either. But priorities matter.
Priority One: Write
The first goal is to write. I wrote for years before publishing a single page. The ideas pile up in my head like unwashed dishes, and writing is how I clear the sink. I write for myself. Call it narcissism if you must – but it’s a productive narcissism.
Priority Two: Be Read
Then comes the hope of being read. A sale is not a reader. Someone might buy your book and never open it. They might read it and hate it. They might toss it into the void. I just want to know.
Last month, I gave away over a hundred copies of Sustenance. Four reviews. One was one-star – she loathed it. Good. At least I know. The other ninety-nine? A mystery. For all I know, they’re gathering digital dust on forgotten hard drives. To be fair, I’ve got thousands of neglected downloads myself, so no judgment. Still, if you did read it, I’d love to hear what you thought. Leave a review.
Priority Three: Money (the tedious bit)
I’m not a consumerist, nor a fan of money-based systems. Unfortunately, that’s the system we’ve got, so yes – I still appreciate sales. But sales without engagement are hollow victories.
Reviews (the absurd bit)
Some people email me their thoughts instead of posting reviews. Lovely, but invisible. I can’t quote a private email without looking like a fraud. I could always fake one —
Critics never tire of reminding us that AI has no emotions, as though this were some startling revelation. Next, perhaps, they’ll inform us that penguins can’t fly and that bankers are allergic to honesty. Yes, generative AI has no emotions. But must we wheel in the fainting couches? Writers don’t need it to sob into its silicon sleeve.
Full disclosure: I am a writer who writes fiction and non-fiction alike. I am also a language philosopher; I study language. And a technologist. I’ve been working with artificial intelligence since the early ’90s with Wave 3 – expert systems. I am still involved with our current incarnation, Wave 4 – generative AI. I know that artificial intelligence has no intelligence. I also know that intelligence is ill-defined and contains metaphysical claims, so there’s that…
Meantime, let’s stroll, briskly, through three ghosts of philosophy: Saussure, Wittgenstein, and Derrida.
Audio: NotebookLM podcast on this topic.
Saussure and the Tree That Isn’t There
Ferdinand de Saussure gave us the tidy structuralist package: the signified (the thing itself, say, a tree) and the signifier (the sound, the squiggle, the utterance “tree,” “arbre,” “árbol”). Lovely when we’re talking about branches and bark. Less useful when we stray into abstractions—justice, freedom, love—the slippery things that dissolve under scrutiny.
Image: Saussure’s Signified and Signifiers
Still, Saussure’s model gets us so far. AI has consumed entire forests of texts and images. It “knows” trees in the sense that it can output something you and I would recognise as one. Does it see trees when it dreams? Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Of course not. But neither do you when you define one.
René Magritte‘s famous painting reminds us that the reference is not the object.
Image: Magritte’s Ceci n’est pas une pipe (This is not a pipe)
Wittgenstein and the Dictionary Without a Key
Ludwig Wittgenstein, that glorious thorn, tore the Saussurean comfort blanket to shreds. Words, he said, are not tethered to the world with neat strings. They define themselves by what they are not. A tree is a tree because it is not a cow, a kettle, or an Aston Martin.
Image: Tree, isolated
Take a dictionary entry:
tree /trē/ noun a woody perennial plant, typically having a single stem or trunk growing to a considerable height and bearing lateral branches at some distance from the ground.
What’s woody? What’s perennial? If you already speak English, you nod along. If you’re an alien with no prior knowledge, you’ve learned nothing. Dictionaries are tautological loops; words point only to more words. If you want to play along in another language, here’s a Russian equivalent.
дерево /derevo/ существительное древесное многолетнее растение, обычно имеющее один стебель или ствол, растущий до значительной высоты и несущее боковые ветви на некотором расстоянии от земли.
AI, like Wittgenstein’s alien, sits inside the loop. It never “sees” a tree but recognises the patterns of description. And this is enough. Give it your prompt, and it dutifully produces something we humans identify as a tree. Not your tree, not my tree, but plausibly treelike. Which is, incidentally, all any of us ever manage with language.
Derrida, Difference, and Emotional Overtones
Enter Jacques Derrida with his deconstructive wrecking ball. Language, he reminds us, privileges pairs—male/female, black/white—where one term lords it over the other. These pairs carry emotional weight: power, hierarchy, exclusion. The charge isn’t in the bark of the word, but in the cultural forest around it.
AI doesn’t “feel” the weight of male over female, but it registers that Tolstoy, Austen, Baldwin, Beauvoir, or Butler did. And it can reproduce the linguistic trace of that imbalance. Which is precisely what writers do: not transmit private emotion, but arrange words that conjure emotion in readers.
On Reading Without Tears
I recently stumbled on the claim that AI cannot “read.” Merriam-Webster defines reading as “to receive or take in the sense of (letters, symbols, etc.), especially by sight or touch.” AI most certainly does this—just not with eyeballs. To deny it the label is to engage in etymological protectionism, a petty nationalism of words.
The Point Writers Keep Missing
Here is the uncomfortable truth: when you write, your own emotions are irrelevant. You may weep over the keyboard like a tragic Byronic hero, but the reader may shrug. Or worse, laugh. Writing is not a syringe injecting your feelings into another’s bloodstream. It is a conjuring act with language.
AI can conjure. It has read Tolstoy, Ishiguro, Morrison, Murakami. It knows how words relate, exclude, and resonate. If it reproduces emotional cadence, that is all that matters. The question is not whether it feels but whether you, the reader, do.
So yes, AI has no emotions. Neither does your dictionary. And yet both will continue to outlast your heartbreak.
Ridley Park 