AI and Writing

Some preliminary thoughts on the moral upsides of AI use for writers.

Photo by Gabriella Clare Marino on Unsplash

AI use by writers is a deeply a polarizing topic on my social media feeds. Some of my writer friends use AI tools in a range of contexts, while others maintain deep skepticism and emphasize concern about how AI undermines authenticity or the craft of writing itself.

The skeptics’ arguments are admittedly powerful. Writing, the argument goes, should involve as little disconnect between a writer’s unique brain and the page as possible. It requires solitude, time and deep thought. AI, then, is an interloper. It interferes with authentic transmission, occluding the way thought is transmitted to the page. It can even infect a person’s writing with other people’s aggregated thoughts. It might be a sort of slippery slope toward plagiarism.

The ideal form of writing, a traditionalist would argue, is one where a writer writes in solitude, with a direct line of energy between brain and page.

I’ll admit I like that vision of writing.

But it’s also more complicated than that.

It turns out that the solitude writing requires might provide its own moral justification for using AI tools in judicious and thoughtful ways.

Morally Dubious Outsourcing

One often overlooked aspect of the artistic process generally is that artists and writers rely on (lots of) other people for their craft. Not just teachers or fellow writers, but the actual humans who provide us with the goods and services that keep us alive while we toil away in a garret somewhere.

Writers outsource much of the materially productive and reproductive aspects of life so we can be alone with our thoughts.

What’s even more frequently overlooked is that historically this outsourcing was deeply morally troubling.

Aristotle openly acknowledged (even took for granted) that the intellectual life, the life of a philosopher, required slavery. Or at least very cheap labor. For most of history, writerly outsourcing was deeply class-based and deeply gendered.

Most well-known writers were upper middle class and had servants.

And those who were not well off could still rely on one of the cheapest forms of labor around: women.

As a personal example, both my grandparents were children of university professors. When they married, one became an academic and one typed up the other one’s dissertation. I doubt anyone would be surprised that my grandfather was the academic and my grandmother the typist, despite similar intellectual talents. My grandmother was, if anything, more intellectual in her tastes and hobbies than my grandfather, who leaned into the social aspect of academic life.

Women who did decide to write faced heartbreaking binary choices. The Nobel Prize winning political economist Elinor Ostrom was told that female academics couldn’t afford to have children. Not afford monetarily, but the time and the distraction.

Male academics could outsource parenting to female partners, who were expected to give up their intellectual goals in favor of their male partners. Female academics didn’t have that luxury.

Ostrom never had children and eventually won the Nobel Prize, but that was a garbage choice and one she shouldn’t have had to make.

Like my grandmother, she made it because it was the binary choice society offered her at the time.

Even today, writers often have supportive spouses behind the scenes and they always have other people doing a range of work that allows them to sit in chairs for long periods of time thinking.

What’s changed is that we have a range of much less exploitative options at our fingertips, including not just AI tools but also crockpots, washers and dryers, and grocery stores. Those things require other humans to build them, of course, but we’ve narrowed the range of involuntary support and widened the range of voluntary support that writers pull from.

I always find it deeply ironic that many writers lean toward anti-market or anti-capitalistic thinking. This is probably because writing traditionally doesn’t pay that well and people always think their genius should have more value in the marketplace than it actually does.

But what many writers often don’t recognize is that the shift from outsourcing labor to slaves to outsourcing labor to paid farmers or (mostly) voluntary spouses to (now) non-human technologies is a huge moral win across the board.

AI Tools, Outsourcing, and Equity

When I’m at home, I can throw in a load a laundry before starting a writing timer and swap things into the dryer when my brain or body needs a break. A task that would take an entire day out of my week one hundred years ago or that would have required me to outsource that labor to another woman in worse circumstances than my own is now accomplished in between paragraphs. It gives my back a nice break along the way.

Aristotle outsourced his food production to slaves and his note-taking to students. My grandfather outsourced his typing tasks to my grandmother. I outsourced the index creation for both my books to professional indexers thanks to generous grants. While grateful for the support, writing the grant was another task that took me away from my kids and my writing.

Soon writers won’t need nearly as much money or as many students or as many sacrificial wives.

Just like washers and dryers, AI tools will have a democratizing effect on the writing process. More people will have more time to write and better support for their writing. Those are good things.

That doesn’t mean there won’t be tradeoffs. There absolutely will be.

Ignoring (for the moment) the risks of introducing AI before writers have learned the craft, one tradeoff is that writers will have a harder time supplementing their income with copyediting, ghostwriting, indexing, and a number of other writing-adjacent tasks. AI will soon be able to do those well. Not as well as gifted human writers in many cases, but they’ll get the job done. And they’ll do it for free.

And while some writers will undoubtedly suffer loss of income, the freedom AI tools offer will get passed on to other writers who couldn’t afford a copyeditor in the first place.

These writers will very likely represent a more diverse range of writers than we’ve seen in the past. Writers who are women or from low-income backgrounds (or both) for starters, but also writers with dyslexia or paralysis or writers who are incarcerated or who just arrived on our shores.

AI tools offer the capacity to support writers the way slaves and women supported writers for thousands of years, but without the human suffering and lost potential along the way.

While we think about what we lose to new AI tools that make writing faster and more efficient, we risk losing sight of the counterfactual: What ideas never developed due to lack of support, lack of funding, or lack of income?

How many would-be writers were simply unable to make it work, not because they lacked the ideas and talent, but because the administrative tasks associated with writing – or just with living – stifled their abilities and swamped their discipline?

More of us can now outsource many non-essential writing tasks to spend more time in deep thought, playing with ideas.

And more people will have the opportunity to play with those ideas while also raising kids or working full time or doing lots of other things that also give their lives meaning.

And we can do this without asking other humans to sacrifice their lives or talents to do so. Or without asking people to face impossible binary choices about how to spend their limited time.

We no longer face a completely stark binary between writing and total dependance on other people.

All that seems like a pretty big win to me, though as you might expect from this Substack, there will be tradeoffs along the way.

Your Turn

In my next post in this series I’ll talk about the darker side of AI tools and writing, but for now I would love to hear your thoughts. Am I right that AI tools will democratize writing? How should we think about balancing this benefit against the range of tradeoffs we’re likely to confront? If you’re a writer (and most of my readers are), how are you thinking about AI tools and how they fit in your writing process? Drop thoughts into the comments! And as always, subscribe and share if you like what you read.

*AI-use transparency statement: I drafted much of this post in a voice memo and then asked my private Claude GPT to provide an outline from that transcript. I drafted from there. I did not use other AI tools this time around due to time constraints and the piece probably reads worse because of it.