Is AI Writing Inevitable?

AI-infused writing is suddenly everywhere: not just in automated email responses or meeting summaries, but in books and even the pages of mainstream newspapers. When an editor at The Wall Street Journal recently defended an op-ed that was 100 percent written by AI, it felt like a possible turning point, at which people are no longer apologizing. So is AI-assisted writing in its post-shame era? What does that mean for the way we process, communicate, and think? Host Charlie Warzel talks to the journalists Elizabeth Spiers and Teddy Brown about being a writer when the robots are coming for you, and how technology does not have to be inevitable. Get more from your favorite Atlantic voices when you subscribe. You’ll enjoy unlimited access to Pulitzer-winning journalism, from clear-eyed analysis and insight on breaking news to fascinating explorations of our world. Atlantic subscribers also get access to exclusive subscriber audio in Apple Podcasts. Subscribe today at TheAtlantic.com/Listener. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:20Speaker 01

  Do you want to hear about visionaries creating a better world? People working in conservation, exploration, science, and tech alongside storytellers imagining and creating a better future. I'm Alex Honnold, professional rock climber and founder of the Honnold Foundation, bringing you season six of Planet Visionaries. This season, I speak to guests like National Geographic photographer Tom Pescek and Anna Rappman, executive director of the Jane Goodall Institute, USA, in partnership with the Rolex Perpetual Planet Initiative. Watch Planet Visionaries on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 0:50Speaker 02

  I just worry that AI is making everybody dumber. I think, you know, when you outsource the fundamental cognitive arsenal that you're using to actually construct a good argument or to make a piece of art, what happens to us as a society if everybody's outsourcing that to AI models?

• 1:06Speaker 03

  When I worked in tech, like I was writing 3,000-page papers about really dense B2B enterprise marketing, like strategies or whatever.

• 1:15Speaker 02

  It's the dream.

• 1:15Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly. And I would get to the end and it would go on to the website. I had no idea what I wrote about. I could not tell you one thing about that because it was just all flowing through Claude.

• 1:34Charlie Warzel?

  I'm Charlie Warzel, and this is Galaxy Brain, a show where today, we're going to talk about artificial intelligence and the thing that I do for a living, which is writing. We're almost four years into the ChatGPT era, and AI writing is everywhere. It's flooded the internet. We've got SEO spam, slop, all that synthetic pablum that's just immediately recognizable. A Pew Research analysis from July estimated that, quote, "signs of AI authorship can be found in over one-third of webpages published after ChatGPT was released." One-third of webpages. It's come for schools, it's come for universities, which have been struggling for years to get students to write papers without chatbot assistance. And in professional writing, we've watched this slow and steady creep of AI show up in book publishing,

• 2:19Charlie Warzel?

  mainstream publications, and op-eds. And for a while, the reaction was all the same. As my colleague Will Aramis wrote recently, quote, "Up to now, those accused of passing off a computer's writing as their own have tended to either apologize or deny it." In April, James Taranto, who is the Wall Street Journal's editorial features editor, wrote that, quote, "Those of us who practice writing as a professional craft have an ethical duty and sometimes a contractual obligation to ensure that our work is original." Now, a few months later, in the same paper, billionaire Stanley Druckenmiller published an op-ed which was identified as 100% written by AI. Only this time, there was no deflecting,

• 3:02Charlie Warzel?

  there was no apologizing. Druckenmiller and the head of the Wall Street Journal's opinion pages admitted to and defended the usage of this chatbot to write the op-ed. The head of the opinion page responded, quote, "AI is a fact of modern life." You hear that a lot now. And I want to be clear, I get it. Writing is hard. It can be solitary, it can be frustrating. There's a lot of people out there who are not professional writers and who don't want to have to write certain things like a just looping back email to a boss or to a coworker. Last week, I had to write an email to a pest control company about being overcharged for a mousetrap. It's not sexy stuff. There's a lot of writing out there that is drudgery. It is the exact stuff that artificial intelligence automates

• 3:45Charlie Warzel?

  really, really well. So, listen, I get it. And there's also the issue here that as a writer, I may not be the most impartial messenger. Of course, I'm going to be defensive about this. I don't want something to come out there and take the one marketable skill that I have and just make it irrelevant. But I also think that there's something else going on here. Something that goes well beyond what precious writerly types like myself think. Because writing isn't just a boring, overly formal thing that we have to do to get through school. It's an essential form of communication. There's a lot of debate over whether writing is synonymous with thinking. And well, I'm not sure that it's one-to-one here. Writing, and especially learning to write effectively, can be a powerful

• 4:30Charlie Warzel?

  skill that helps advance or sharpen our thinking. Writing is a way to organize our thoughts. It's a way to set aside quiet, focused time to understand what we really believe about something. It is the scaffolding on which we build arguments, which means that it is, in part, a way to crystallize how we see the world. What I noticed most in the response to this Wall Street Journal op-ed and all the backlash was this group of people arguing that this is where things are going. The toothpaste can't be put back in the tube, and so we might as well embrace it. It's a resistance is futile type of argument. But the thing about new technologies is that they're never inevitable. Nor is it written in stone that professional writers and news organizations and people who rely on the trust

• 5:11Charlie Warzel?

  of their audience to sell a product that is quite literally the craft of written argumentation need to roll over completely without negotiating their own boundaries in this moment. To automate our drudgery is understandable, but to automate such a broad form of communication, to outsource an important tool for working past the roadblocks that exist in our own minds, that's something different than embracing a new gadget. And so when this op-ed came out, I saw all the backlash, all the, "This is akin to using a calculator. This is like spell check. This is like Grammarly. Please stop all the hand-wringing." I wanted to go deeper. I can imagine this grim future where these tools take over almost completely and where writing becomes this

• 5:52Charlie Warzel?

  strange, somewhat vestigial skill. In that future, I think humanity is worse off. Now, I can also imagine a future where AI-assisted writing is more akin to a tool. Maybe it's something that someday breaks open a new hybrid form of the craft. Is there a world where chatbots can help people to learn how to structure arguments better, to enhance their vocabularies, to learn how to spot good writing from bad, and make us better communicators in the stuff that matters while also automating all the little stuff? I'm skeptical, but it doesn't mean that it's not possible. So what does the future of AI writing look like? I wanted to bring on some other writers who are living through this moment and who crucially have different experiences doing different kinds of professional writing. Teddy Brown

• 6:35Charlie Warzel?

  is a reporter at CNN, and in a previous life, he worked in the tech industry as a technical writer, doing a lot of that for-hire, less sexy writing that's under threat from Claude and ChatGPT. He wrote an essay titled "The End of the Working Writer" that gets at a lot of this stuff. Elizabeth Spiers is a contributing opinion writer at The New York Times, the host of Slate's Money podcast, and a digital strategist who also teaches writing. You may also know her as the founding editor of Gawker. She recently wrote a column with the evocative title, "Why You Shouldn't Use AI to Write a Professional Op-Ed: Buy Me, a Professional Op-Ed Writer Who Has Less Real Competition If You Do." So how should we think about all this? Teddy and Elizabeth join me now to talk about all of it.

• 7:25Charlie Warzel?

  Teddy, Elizabeth, thank you for coming on Galaxy Brain. Welcome.

• 7:29Speaker 02

  Thank you for having us.

• 7:30Speaker 03

  Thanks for having us here.

• 7:31Charlie Warzel?

  So I want to start here with a baseline. You're both professional writers, so walk me through a little bit your relationship to generative AI and chatbots as it relates to your life and work here. Writing, drafting, research, cheap Google assistant. Teddy, I'll start with you, but just how are you using this in your life or not using it?

• 7:52Speaker 03

  Yeah, so I actually don't use it at all for any of my professional stuff. It's funny, I came from tech before, so I've become, I'm staff at CNN now, but that was sort of only five months ago. But before that, all my day jobs were in tech when I used AI quite a lot, just because it was sort of coming down from a lot of leadership that this is the tools we're going to use. And then I've shifted over during my tenure at CNN to not using them at all. So it's become sort of, you know, you see the differences emerge pretty quickly about how your process works and how, you know, I was a freelancer for a long time as well, so I always kept sort of a partition up between my journalistic work and my, you know, my day job work, when I would use, you know, AI tools in my day job and not use them for my journalistic work.

• 8:32Charlie Warzel?

  Elizabeth, what about you?

• 8:34Speaker 02

  Yeah, so I'm a writer and I co-host Slate Money, which is Slate's finance news podcast of the week. So I have to, you know, write about AI, we sometimes podcast about AI. So I use the tools partly to understand them, but also, you know, I work in a lot of newsrooms as a consultant, and so I've been responsible in some cases for introducing AI to help automate workflows or to, you know, do certain types of data journalism. So I'm not anti-AI, but I do not use it to write. It's not very helpful for research, I've found, because it's sort of worse than baseline Google in terms of what it produces. So I'm happy to leave it entirely out of my writing process.

• 9:17Charlie Warzel?

  Inside newsrooms, what are some of the ways that you've seen? This this stuff come into a newsroom and and really like help the journalistic process?

• 9:28Speaker 02

  Where I've used it more directly, it's been for automating workflows. If you work at any kind of large newsroom, you know that we're dealing with a bunch of different pieces of software that very often are cobbled together by, you know, processes that are heavily, you know, human oriented and they can be tedious and a lot of it's just, you know, using things that are badly connected to other things. And you can use AI to automate some of that stuff, which takes the pressure off of, I think, journalists to keep doing things that are tedious and administrative as opposed to actually going out and reporting or creating stories and columns and, you know, the things that were actually hard to do.

• 10:07Charlie Warzel?

  Right. And there is that that difference between the the research tool, the cheap, you know, Google replacement and the like, I have this corpus of information. It's so massive or it's, you know, it's scattered in all these different places, the ability to go and scan through that type of stuff or collate or organize like those daisy chaining really tedious tasks together to make something else is, I think, a sort of an underlooked version of that, which I think a lot of journalists tend to be the industry wide, very split on on AI stuff. And that's sort of what I want to get into here, especially as we just talk about writing.

• 10:49Charlie Warzel?

  So we're basically, November will be four years into the chat GPT era. AI writings obviously flooded the internet. We have the book publishing industry, which, you know, according to a lot of reporting is in is in utter chaos. Book deals falling through. I had someone in the book industry tell me recently, don't write one now, like, don't pitch one, don't just like stop on books for like six months, please, because the industry has no idea what the hell to do and they're just terrified that they're going to be getting AI generated work. And then you have further in the world of professional writing. You have something like the billionaire Stanley Druckenmiller, who recently published

• 11:30Charlie Warzel?

  an op ed in the Wall Street Journal, identified as 100% written by AI. And both him and the head of the Journal's opinion page admitted to and defended the usage of chatbots. The the head of the opinion page wrote in his own op ed, who knows if he wrote that himself, that, quote, AI is a fact of modern life. Right after that, Semaphore did some reporting, showed that an analysis of 310 guest writer op eds in the last six months in the Wall Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, and the New York Times, one in six use AI, according to Pangram, the AI detector. Now Pangram is in its own way, you know, we're not 100% sure about the accuracy there.

• 12:15Charlie Warzel?

  But it seems like there's a lot here. And I just, I normally start off these conversations to work towards like the big thing, but I let's do the big thing first, like, help me understand what's going on here. Like, are we just, are we, are we cooked?

• 12:25Speaker 02

  It depends on what kind of writing we're talking about. I wrote a little ranny thing on Medium about the Jigo Druckenmiller situation. And it was really directed specifically to people who want to publish professional op eds. And that's actually not where, you know, I think the big problem is because for the most part, the Druckenmiller kind of situation, part of that's coming to from the way that these op ed pages work where the problem is not about AI. But I do see people using AI for what I think of as commodity content a lot. You know, you go on LinkedIn and you see the same kind of style of posts that's, you know, here's what my divorce taught me about B2B sales or something of that variety. And, you know, that's, that's people sort of learning to write with a formula, but

• 13:10Speaker 02

  that's also, you can sort of tell when they're using AI. And I think AI can replicate formulaic, unoriginal stuff really well. So if that's what you're doing, then you probably are cooked. But I also think that there is still a premium for original ideas and I don't think that AI is really capable of coming up with that. And the writing is that it produces is very cliche written and formulaic because it's being trained on a corpus of data that for the most part is, you know, mostly mediocre. And there's just no way to kind of prompt an AI into the sort of creativity or sort of holistic understanding of what it's outputting the way that you can with a human and human editors.

• 13:55Speaker 03

  I always tell people that it's not the ticks that these things, that's not use of cliche, it's not list of three, it's not, you know, it's not X or Y, it's that these, they don't, words don't mean anything. Like, you look, you read the entire piece and like, I didn't learn anything from here. This is all hollow. That's what AI writing actually is.

• 14:08Charlie Warzel?

  So a feature of the dust up with the Wall Street Journal thing, which I actually think is much more important than the op ed itself, is that lack of shame that we're talking about here, right? I think it's the reason that so many people paid attention to it. If there was, you know, tail between the legs kind of thing, it would be like, oh, yeah, you know, somebody else got caught. We don't do this. Are we, do you think we're creeping towards a like a post shame AI writing era here that does this mark for you all a, a, a actual departure? Or is this just like a couple of guys who were, you know, probably going in this direction anyway?

• 14:46Speaker 02

  I think there's already, you know, a kind of post shame stance from, you know, a lot of the writing community that's not really institutionalized. And I don't think that matters as much, but I think if you're talking about a news organization where trust matters, the relationship with the reader matters. I think at the very least, you owe the reader disclosure that AI was used in the piece. And, you know, it's, I write, I'm a contributing writer for the New York Times and my contract explicitly states that I cannot use AI, even for, you know, putting it into copy edit anything, not allowed to do that. In fact, if even if I'm going to write about AI, I'm supposed to get permission to use the tools first.

• 15:26Speaker 02

  So the Times is sort of at the exact opposite end of the, I think, restrictive side of what people are and aren't supposed to do. But until Paul Jigo wrote this editorial, everyone I know at the Wall Street Journal was under the impression that you could not do your work with AI that way either. So I think it may have some backfiring effect on them that, first of all, they're going to get deluged with AI written submissions. But also they're going to have to clarify what they, you know, where that line is. And so far, they, they haven't, so.

• 16:00Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think, you know, there's, there's a few arguments I've seen emerging and one I'm not entirely unsympathetic to is that if the writing is good, who cares? And like, I, I understand where that comes from. Like, I know, I like, I think it's actually beholden on readers and critics and things to be like, that writing sucks. And I don't care if a human wrote it or if an AI wrote it. And now it just so happens at the balance of that's majority of AI writing is awful and that you should be able to identify it. But, and I know that it puts a lot of pressure on readers who are just inundated with all of this slop, basically, but it is a little bit like we should be a little more critical of what we're putting in front of our faces and absorbing.

• 16:38Charlie Warzel?

  I understand what you're saying about have, have some, you know, you got to put a little bit of onus to on the reader, like if, to, to, you know, figure, figure out what's there also, like to care about it, to vote with your eyeballs, et cetera. But, but to me, it feels like this is like, if a frustration that I have with the conversation around this op ed and around the, the feeling too, from certain people who are just like, this is inevitable, this is where it's going to go, the internet is going to flood with this stuff. So like, we're going to look back on the hand wringing about this and kind of laugh one day, right? It's going to feel super quaint, all you people who are doing this.

• 17:20Charlie Warzel?

  And I, that may be true, like that, we, I may be on the losing end of this thing, right? Like, everyone's just going to be doing slop stuff and it's going to get more sophisticated. We'll figure out some way forward. But for me, there's also, in any era of technological change, you actually need people who are going to protest it, who are going to stand athwart it and stop it and, and object to it, because that's also how we like create the new norms for this stuff, right? If we don't spend some time thinking about that and having some people actually push back, if nobody pushes back, then it just happens and it happens however these companies want or whatever the, you know, the lowest common denominator of slop, you know, that

• 18:05Charlie Warzel?

  can get published. But I, I find I'm really frustrated by the idea that some of these institutions, like the whole point of being the institution is to stand up for, you know, institutional things.

• 18:17Speaker 02

  What's crazy about this is that, first of all, it's the Wall Street Journal doing it where you have one of the most, what, what, you know, business side people would call premium products in this space. And you're actively entitifying your own product when what you're selling is, you know, the, the original thoughts of Stanley Druckenmiller, not what he couldn't be bothered to slap into Google, you know, Google Doc himself, but produced via AI. It's, it's your, your value proposition, even on the business side, is eroded by that. So I think there's a lot of short term thinking about headcount and cost that really at the, you know, people are using AI in ways that are not necessarily additive at the expense

• 19:02Speaker 02

  of the long term value proposition of their own products.

• 19:06Speaker 03

  I do wonder about this sometimes because we're on the media and we exist in sort of a filter bubble we're on making, right? Sometimes I'm like, do people, do, do general audiences care that Druckenmiller uses AI? Does do the, do the 85% of people who do not care about writing and actually find writing a chore, that they don't want to write a note about why they're going to be five minutes late, they'd rather press a button and have that happen for them, actually care that much? And I worry about that because I care so much about writing.

• 19:35Speaker 02

  I think you're right, but I also think, you know, with newsrooms, you do have a we have a trust problem already. And I think the readers care if they think they're being deceived. I don't think they really care about the, you know, the process of writing or writing for its own sake.

• 19:51Charlie Warzel?

  I also think alongside the, the trust part of it too, there's an effort thing that I think is actually very real that comes with the part of the trust. Like, if people, you know, can't be arsed to like, like do, do the work and, and everyone else is like, that's fine. Yeah, just like send that sucker through, right? There's this idea of like, so where else do they cut corners?

• 20:20Speaker 00

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• 20:54Speaker 03

  Do you want to hear about visionaries creating a better world? People working in conservation, exploration, science and tech alongside storytellers imagining and creating a better future. I'm Alex Honnold, professional rock climber and founder of the Honnold Foundation, bringing you season six of Planet Visionaries. This season, I speak to guests like National Geographic photographer Tom Peszek and Anna Rattman, executive director of the Jane Goodall Institute, USA, in partnership with the Rolex Perpetual Planet Initiative. Watch Planet Visionaries on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 21:27Charlie Warzel?

  Teddy, you wrote a good piece earlier this summer that was titled "The End of the Working Writer," and I want to get to that, but the piece was kind of kicked off or inspired perhaps by a post by Bloomberg's Joe Weisenthal, who's constantly posting on X. This post set off a debate online, and he wrote, quote, "Unfortunately, I think in the near future, not using LLMs to write for you will be like someone refusing to use Google Maps for directions in a new city. A bizarre, unsocratic choice that's just completely incomprehensible to the vast majority of people." So first, I just wanted to ask, do you think that that prediction is right here? Do you think that's kind of where we're heading?

• 22:07Speaker 03

  I think the vast majority of people might be a little bit of an understatement. I think that as adoption picks up for a lot of these tools, I do think those people who don't, again, don't really care about writing that much and the process of writing and view it as a chore they can replace with a few clicks or a few keystrokes. Yeah, I think that's going to be that will be quite a lot of people are going to sort of acting that way and sort of, and it's just ease of doing these sort of things. We're interested in the process of writing for its own sake and in a way to sort of unpack our own thoughts and think about our problems we're trying to solve. But yeah, I unfortunately see this becoming a little bit more acceptable to just use these chats for writing anything you need it to write.

• 22:47Charlie Warzel?

  So Teddy, you mentioned earlier that you, and that's part of this Substack post that you did, is that you used to do this kind of work. And a good bit of your argument in "The End of the Working Writer" is that AI and writing conversation can get caught up in this like craft artistic corridor, but that a lot of writing is very utilitarian. It's very technical, right? It's this stuff, press the button and say you're going to be five minutes late, or it is this like, you know, copywriting, you're writing white papers, product descriptions, copy that's going to be used for search engine optimization, corporate speak, LinkedIn posts, Elizabeth, as you said. And since you did this kind

• 23:29Charlie Warzel?

  of work, you argue, maybe this conversation is not talking enough about how AI is changing that brand of writing. So tell me about "The Working Writer" a little bit, define it better for me, and what AI is doing to that category of writing.

• 23:44Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, it's all writing that no one cares about, is really what it comes down to. But I did this work because it was well compensated and I had to afford rent in New York. And this was my career for a long time. I think that what happens is that AI is very good at writing that doesn't matter. All the things you were talking about, all those pieces of little pieces of internet copy that are not meant to actually be critically engaged with, AI is extremely good at writing those things. And so there are two forces happening. There's, one is that people recognize that this writing is actually not worth that much anymore. And so they're like, oh, we can, how can we do this for the smallest cost possible? And you have these enormous costs of AI integrations into technology

• 24:26Speaker 03

  companies generally where a lot of the better paid opportunities were. Daniel Colitz did a great piece in The Baffler today that's talking exactly about this. Like it is, there's this, this sort of squeezing out of what I compared to sort of session musicians in music. It's like, well, if I don't need this to pay these four people to play the backing track for this commercial thing, I can just plug into Suno and get the same thing, basically. It's like, why do I need to pay them $10,000? And like, oh, right, that was paying those four people's rent for the next couple of months. And so I really worry about this hollowing out a generation of writers who are sort of 10 years behind me, who don't have these

• 25:10Speaker 03

  opportunities to work on writing that is not necessarily the most wonderful artistic literary pursuit, but is a way to at least make a respectable living in a very expensive city. And now those jobs are just going to be gone.

• 25:26Charlie Warzel?

  Let me just play devil's advocate here. There are probably people who don't live in New York City who are going to listen and say, if it's work that fundamentally doesn't have any value and it's a good thing. Like, what do we lose if we lose this?

• 25:41Speaker 03

  It's a big question, because I was thinking about this before I got on, and sort of the idea of like, why, if you're going to take the job away from like 50 farmers with using mechanical tools or something, it's like, well, should we not do that? Should we not advance past this in order to sort of create more? Why would we keep paying people to do this writing no one actually cares about? And I understand that argument sort of in the medium and long term, but in the short term, it's doing actual material damage to people who are like trying to feed themselves.

• 26:10Speaker 02

  I just worry that AI is making everybody dumber. I think, you know, when you outsource the fundamental cognitive arsenal that you're using to actually construct a good argument or to make a piece of art, what happens to us as a society if everybody's outsourcing that to, you know, AI models? I see this a little bit with, you know, I have an 11 year old son in school, they've sort of, most of, he and his peers all know how to use ChatGPT to ask a question. And I think it's increasingly difficult for people in academic settings to get their students to kind of do their rigorous work of sitting down and trying to think through an argument without these aids. And I think it maybe

• 26:53Speaker 02

  badly prepares students for, you know, the real world where they may not have that assistance all the time. Or they may have to learn how to think through more complex things that are just going to be far more difficult because they haven't developed that intellectual rigor that comes from having to work things, work your way through things from scratch.

• 27:12Speaker 03

  I even feel that as an adult, I mean, when I was working, when I worked in tech, like I was writing 3,000 page papers about really dense B2B enterprise marketing like strategies, whatever.

• 27:22Charlie Warzel?

  The dream.

• 27:23Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly. And I would get to the end and it would go onto the website. I had no idea what I wrote about. I have no, I could not tell you one thing about that because it was just all flowing through Claude. And all it was doing was editing line by line and making sure it sounded like, sounded good. But I could not tell you anything about what I actually wrote, which is like, which is weird. It's a weird sensation.

• 27:44Charlie Warzel?

  This gets to, I wanted to get here, which is, you know, writing, we don't think of writing, we, the broader we doesn't think of writing, I think, as a technology, but it is. It's an amazing technology that allows us to put our ideas in other people's heads in this intimate, transformative way. And then there's this question of what it does for us, right? So I wanted to read something from the publication Nature about what might be going on when we write that I enjoyed here, which is that, quote, "Writing compels us to think not in the chaotic, nonlinear way that our minds typically wander, but in a structured, intentional manner. By writing it down, we can sort years of research, data and analysis into an actual story, thereby identifying our main message and

• 28:27Charlie Warzel?

  the influence of our work. This is not merely a philosophical observation, it is backed by scientific evidence." And so I want to ask you all as writers, is the act of writing thinking? Or is it something different? Is it just, is it something that forces us to think so that we may write? And I want to get your thoughts on this because I think it's necessary and useful to put a point on what we are losing cognitively when we outsource it.

• 28:56Speaker 02

  I think it is thinking. It's not the only form of thinking, but we do, there's plenty of research that kind of indicates that there are parts of your brain that are activated when you're constructing something as a written sentence versus other types of, you know, communicative expressions. There's also a lot of anthropological history that indicates that when humans started developing language, it changed the way that they were cognitively structured. So I think if you remove that, I just, I think the additive benefits of it probably just go away and there are systemic effects on your cognition altogether. You know, maybe it gets replaced by something else. I don't know. But, you

• 29:38Speaker 02

  know, I wouldn't rule out the possibility that whatever we're losing can't be replaced in the future. But I think for right now, we know that it serves a purpose and we don't have anything to replace it. So that does concern me.

• 29:52Speaker 03

  I mean, of course, writing is thinking. It's thinking through issues and trying to sort of figure out what you're actually trying to say or trying to write down. I mean, it is like, it's actively trying to untangle problems that you're dealing with instead of being like, you can just be, it's incredibly seductive tools like Claude and ChatGPT, because you can just put in a problem and it gives you a solution. And I know that people will say you can have it challenge you and you can turn things and press these knobs and all this kind of stuff. But like, it is also outsourcing that path for you.

• 30:23Charlie Warzel?

  I've thought a lot about this because I've had some people challenge me on the writing is thinking thing. Like, are you actually doing that? And I would say if I had to, you know, really be precise about it, maybe it's not just the act of thinking, but there's no other time when I can get myself alone in a space where I am forced to think in order to write on like a micro, like, you know, sentence by sentence, piece of logic by piece of logic basis, right? Like, I am having to have an extremely honest conversation with myself of like, did that make sense? Does that connect to this in

• 31:04Charlie Warzel?

  a way? And I think when people say like, yes, oh, man, it's such a good sparring partner, Claude, ChatGPT is so good at, like you said, you know, coming up with a counterargument or, you know, taking down your straw man arguments, whatever it is.

• 31:22Charlie Warzel?

  I think, you know, maybe, maybe that is true in some way. But I, I don't think it's as good as having to deal with like the honesty of yourself where you're like, I have this idea in the back of my head. I need to communicate on that on the page. Does what's on the page match that abstract, you know, idea in my brain? And like frankly, the, I think the act of writing is reconciling that with yourself. And that ability to be alone, like it forces you actually to do like a lot of, you know, people find writing so agonizing sometimes on the page because it's like, you have to be honest with yourself. Like, is that my actual idea? Is that, you know, is that any good? Is that worth anything? And that conversation to me like, that's what I think we're losing.

• 32:06Speaker 03

  And the models themselves, I mean, the learning libraries force any problem that you're trying to interrogate through one of these, one of the chats to look only backwards. They can only look at things that have already happened. And I think it limits the amount of novelty you can have in an argument. It limits the paths you can take with it. And I know that Silicon Valley is very technistic towards interiority and introspection right now, but it's the only way you can get there is thinking about, how do I feel about this? What does this do to me? What am I curious about and how this makes me feel? And that is doesn't exist in a learning library. That doesn't exist in a chatbot.

• 32:35Speaker 02

  Also, just at the macro level, it's, it's now that you mentioned that, I think Silicon Valley has a general anti-intellectualism orientation that sort of gets built into the tech. It's, I don't want to have to, you know, use my precious brain cells on going through rigorous material that might be difficult. I'm going to build a piece of software that's going to do it for me. And I think the long-term ramifications of that are just sort of bad for society. There's a cult in Silicon Valley of, of trying to learn things very quickly, but without friction, you know? And I think if you take those things away, what you're doing is, is something that kind of looks surface level, like intellectual development, but isn't when you scratch the surface.

• 33:18Speaker 02

  It's not, it lacks the rigor, the complexity, all of that.

• 33:21Charlie Warzel?

  Ezra Klein had a, had a phrase that I liked with this, which is the matrix theory of the mind, right? With the idea that like, some people see information as the, the matrix thing, right? You just like, you plug, you jack into the, the, you know, the Borg and you upload the information and like, boom, I understand everything about Kant, right? Like I, I know how to, you know, fly this F-15, whatever it is. And it's like, the actual process of, of learning tends to be extremely different, which is like, it's just about how you, your brain grapple with the material, with information, and, and you think. And I think it's, it's the, it's the, you know, disagreement that Silicon Valley has between one style of learning and the other.

• 34:02Speaker 00

  If you're trying to get news today, you'll find a lot of biased algorithms, rage bait and AI noise. Thanks, social media. That's where InPress comes in. It's a social platform on top of factual journalism, not the other way around. Track your reading and earn points. It's like Strava for your brain. Plus, you can connect with other users in your city who share your genuine curiosity. Ditch the echo chamber for reality with InPress. Download it today for iOS or Android at inpress.app. That's I, N as in news nerd, press.

• 34:45Speaker 01

  Do you want to hear about visionaries creating a better world? People working in conservation, exploration, science and tech, alongside storytellers imagining and creating a better future. I'm Alex Honnold, professional rock climber and founder of the Honnold Foundation, bringing you season six of Planet Visionaries. This season, I speak to guests like National Geographic photographer Tom Pechek and Anna Raffman, executive director of the Jane Goodall Institute, USA, in partnership with the Rolex Perpetual Planet Initiative. Watch Planet Visionaries on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 35:14Charlie Warzel?

  I wanted to bring up though, the argument with all of this, with, with AI assisted writing. There are, there are folks that have argued that there's an accessibility issue here, that not all writers either could, you know, can, can afford to have human editing, or that some brains are requiring outside help or accommodations. Chatbots assist with this. And another way of saying this without getting into a conversation just about ability or disability, is that not everyone can write well. And not everyone wants to write well. And certainly, most people aren't professional writers. So how should we be thinking about these tools for a crowd of people that aren't pros?

• 35:57Speaker 03

  I think there's a lot of people who see writing as an intellectual costume they can sort of put on, and these chatbots allow them to do that in a very seamless, frictionless way. I'm, I've been on the record saying this, I think there should be fewer writers. I think there are way too many people who call themselves writers that are and should not be in the industry generally. I think this sort of, it's now flooded with that. It might be good in the long run because people who are actually good at this might be able to separate themselves.

• 36:24Speaker 02

  I think also, it's, it's, it's sort of, I think people have this simplistic idea of writing that, you know, anyone can do it, just because anybody can sit down and type into a document, or most people can. But I can't think of, there, there's a whole range of other professional skills that if I said, I'm really bad at this, but I want to be able to do it, people would look at me like I had three heads. Like if, if I wanted to go play NBA, WNBA basketball right now, I'm 5'1" and 49. It's not going to happen. And there's no number of tools that I could add to myself that would get me there. And so I do think also, people do need to understand that writing is a specialized skill. You know, it does matter. I think if you want to do it professionally, that you're good at it.

• 37:07Speaker 02

  If you don't care about doing it professionally, no one is going to stop you from writing for your own enjoyment, or writing on a blog. I mean, the, the internet has completely democratized that. You can publish for, at almost zero cost.

• 37:19Charlie Warzel?

  You expressed it, you know, perfectly, that there are, there are so many other genres of, of thing where if you're like, I want to do this professionally and I'm not good at it, and people are like, tough, right? But what's interesting and frustrating about the conversation with writing is that we always seem to culturally regard it differently. Like, clearly, writing is a craft. It's an art form, but it's also this thing that everyone does, right?

• 37:41Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 37:42Charlie Warzel?

  And often in these quotidian ways, as we're talking about. And so I think it's treated differently than other crafts. And what I was thinking about in this space was Hollywood and, you know, AI video generation tools. Like, the guilds in Hollywood go out on strike, in part because they want protections from the studios, from AI and standards. And for the most part, people don't say like, oh, in a couple of years, all the hand wringing, you know, like, all these people are being precious. They're going to look back on this and, and cringe at what they were doing. And I think that's because most people aren't out there every day, making movies and sending them to their boss, right? Like the way that they write an email or like a LinkedIn post. And so I'm wondering, like, do you guys think that writing is more at risk than other creative

• 38:25Charlie Warzel?

  crafts to AI because it's of its universal nature?

• 38:29Speaker 03

  I certainly think the large middle class of it is, for sure. And in the same way that I think the large middle class of movie making, or large middle class of graphic designers are at risk. I do think there is a huge contingent of this sort of middle 80% of writers who have to make ends meet, not through prestige legacy media outlets. And those are at huge amount of risk.

• 38:49Speaker 02

  I think some of it too, is just that the, the skillset that you use in writing and all of the tools available to you and all of the things that you learn live entirely in your head. You know, if you're a filmmaker and you have a wide set of skills, you know, this also involves using things that people see externally as being highly technical. With, if you're a writer, you're using a laptop, which everybody has. And then so the, the idea that there's a barrier to entry to writing, is people don't kind of understand that because they're like, well, I could write something and put it on the internet and what's the difference? So I think anything that has this kind of zero barrier to entry, people tend to overestimate the ease of doing it.

• 39:30Charlie Warzel?

  I think we're all trying to be mindful of, you know, we, we are in our bubble of this matters to us. So as writers, are there opportunities here? Like, there's, there's a few excerpts of media that I've read with, where people just start like, you know, talking to the chatbot in the middle of the thing as part of, it's almost like a creative fiction-y thing. I'm just curious if, if, if you all see the possibility for opportunities here that aren't just like, I'm kind of going to give a very bland prompt and then get out, you know, a bunch of Claude Lora Mipsum.

• 40:07Speaker 03

  That's an edge case for me, the sort of avant garde being like, I, you know, I think there's people wanting to read your prompts about like how you got something. I think that's actually a fascinating artistic case, but like, I'm, I don't care about your writing. Show me what your prompt looks like, because that's more interesting to me, because it actually shows what your thinking is. I think that what's the most likely scenario for me, or most, I don't know if this is most likely, or sort of what I prefer to happen, is that professional writing becomes more akin to vinyl collecting now. And this is sort of like a, not a curiosity, but something for people who really care about it. And that they actually seek out, you know, good writing done by humans. Just because the flood sadly is already here. I don't want to be too fatalistic, but it's just going to be the state of things where

• 40:52Speaker 03

  it's just like, this is too easy. You know, it's too big, the tools are too entrenched, and this is sort of, we have to figure out ways to live with it.

• 41:00Charlie Warzel?

  Elizabeth, where do you fall on that?

• 41:02Speaker 02

  I mean, I think that, you know, if we do end up in a scenario where we're flooded with AI writing and it's all crap, that actually makes people who can do things that AI can't more valuable. Like, for example, AI can't write jokes. It's terrible at comedy. And partly because it doesn't have a kind of meta sensibility. It's incapable of understanding the sort of intersection between absurdity and novelty, which is where humor comes from. So I'm not terribly worried in the short term. I think there is a possibility that we end up with eventually models that are good enough that they can produce novelty and that they do produce interesting output. And then I don't know what happens. You know,

• 41:43Speaker 02

  I think we all probably adapt to it in different ways. Right now, I'm not thinking about that far ahead about any of it.

• 41:50Charlie Warzel?

  I feel sort of both sides of this. I said this on a different podcast, but like, I'm a really bad emailer in the sense that like, no punctuation or caps or things like that.

• 42:03Speaker 02

  You're a Jeffrey Epstein-style emailer.

• 42:07Charlie Warzel?

  Yeah, I guess. Yeah, I guess that's it. Just wonderful comparison to make there. Yes. But that's like my email style. And it's embarrassing and it's always been. And I've had people comment recently, like, you know what, man, I know you sent that email because it's hot garbage. Like, thank you. Thank you so much for like not taking the time.

• 42:32Speaker 02

  Your stamp of authenticity.

• 42:32Charlie Warzel?

  Yeah, exactly. It's authentic. And I see that, you know, more in responses to just like my work personally and things like that. Like, people feeling that that level of craft is like as a distinction, right, in that. And so I feel like there is that way, which in the near term, it can really distinguish. But I just wanted to ask both of you to close out here. If you were made writing czar today, and you could set kind of some lists of like standards that you would like to see like codified for professional writing in terms of this technology, disclosure, all that stuff, like, what would be just

• 43:13Charlie Warzel?

  like a couple of your first steps? Just things that like boilerplate, like, this is the norm that we want to impose around AI and writing?

• 43:22Speaker 02

  At minimum, I think disclosure has to be a norm. Like, I don't, you know, even if newsrooms get to the point where they decide every single contributor can use AI, including to construct an argument, not informing the reader, I think, is a mistake. Because then readers will, you know, could easily assume that all of the work of the newsroom is outsourced to AI. And therefore, it's sort of commoditized and not that original. And I think it's a trust issue.

• 43:54Speaker 03

  I think Elizabeth, it brings up a really good point, is that, and the journal thing is a perfect example of this, that there is this crux and foundational trust for institutions. Listen, there's a lot of trust issues generally, but putting yet another one in the dam is really difficult to sort of navigate ourselves away from. On the individual level for writers, I mean, I hate to say it, but it just doesn't have a place in my sort of toolkit as a journalist. By sort of filter of, you know, Google searches, of sure, Gemini is in my life every day because it's the top of the search bar. But I just, after using it so, so much in my previous

• 44:35Speaker 03

  life, I have just sort of been like, oh, this is actually quite freeing to do this work myself again. And maybe that's personal. Maybe that's sort of me going from one sort of hard side to the other. But there is something so rewarding about finding stuff out yourself. And I really love that part of reporting.

• 44:54Charlie Warzel?

  I think that's a great place to leave it. Teddy, Elizabeth, thank you for coming on and talking about the this weird place that we find ourselves in with this strange typing thing that we started doing a long time ago that now robots do. But thank you for coming on.

• 45:11Speaker 03

  Thanks so much, Charlie.

• 45:11Speaker 02

  Thanks for having us.

• 45:16Charlie Warzel?

  If you liked what you saw here, new episodes of Galaxy Brain drop every Friday. You can subscribe on the Atlantic's YouTube channel, or on Apple, or Spotify, or wherever it is that you get your podcasts. And if you want to support this work and the work of my fellow colleagues, you can subscribe to the publication at theatlantic.com/listener. That's theatlantic.com/listener. Thanks so much, and I'll see you on the internet.

• 45:49Speaker 00

  If you're trying to get news today, you'll find a lot of biased algorithms, rage bait, and AI noise. Thanks, social media. That's where Inpress comes in. It's a social platform on top of factual journalism, not the other way around. Track your reading and earn points. It's like Strava for your brain. Plus, you can connect with other users in your city who share your genuine curiosity. Ditch the echo chamber for reality with Inpress. Download it today for iOS or Android at inpress.app. That's I, N as in news nerd, press.