(Analysis) I will teach you. writing and rhetoricBut college students and I often overlook surprisingly complex questions. “What is writing?”
And can artificial intelligence really do that?
Many people think of writing as putting words on a page. But from very early on, writers saw their art as much more than that. From Enheduanna, first named author on recordfor Plato and Aristotle, writing has been depicted and defined in ways that suggest that AI may not “write” at all.
If not, what should we call AI text? ChatGPT and I have an idea.
praise and entreaty
Enheduanna lived around 2,300 BC and was a powerful princess, priestess, and poet of the Akkadian Empire in what is now Iraq. She is celebrated as oldest known writeralthough the authorship of her poems and hymns is debated.
one of her poems,”Exaltation of Inanna” reveals a sense of what writing is and does, depicting it as a living medium that expresses experience and shapes the future.
beginning, poem praise ancient mesopotamian goddess inannawas associated with fertility and war, among other powers. “Young lady, you are the guardian of all greatness,” says Enheduanna. jane hirshfield.
That praise may be strategic. Following this, Enheduanna overthrows the rebel king, Lugal-Ane, and petitions him to depose her and take her place in the temple of Ur. “Now I am cast out/to a place where lepers live,” she writes, describing her suffering. “When night comes / And the shine / Is hidden around me.”
Saddened, Enheduanna writes a new destiny. in Translated by Sophos Hellethe priestess imagines Inanna coming to her rescue and “tearing her apart.”[ing] Please break this fate, Lugare Ane. ”And it appears her plea was successful. At the end of the poem, Enheduanna is depicted returning to his post.
In Enheduanna’s poetry, writing is more than just conveying information. It interacts with the present and changes the future. The priestess’s plea pleased and touched the goddess, and she restored Enheduanna to his position. However, historians have little evidence as to whether expulsion and return actually occurred.
However, her poetry had the following characteristics: real world effectshelp you create religious and political unity The world’s first empire. For example, her writing incorporates the Sumerian goddess Inanna. Akkadian goddess Ishtardescribes a single “”.queen of heaven”
AI lighting can be used to create changes such as: sway someone’s political opinions. But it lacks the human emotions that enable experiences such as admiration, gratitude, and suffering—the emotions and motivations that make writing a living medium that impacts the real world.
Transforming rather than informing
Two thousand years after Enheduanna, Plato and his student Aristotle offered another influential view of writing that complemented her view.
The Phaedrus discusses the following: The relationship between love and rhetoricPlato famously defined writing as follows: bad copy of speech. The task of speech is to express thoughts. Thought represents knowledge and truth. Similarly, Aristotle writes“The spoken word is a symbol of spiritual experience; the written word is a symbol of the spoken word.”
Even its definition presents a striking contrast to AI. lack of thought or mental experience. Its output begins with data aggregation and text generation.
To understand what writing is, we must also look at what it does. Although Plato values speaking more than writing, he suggests good writing in the Phaedrus. May lead the learner to truth and knowledge. Like Enheduanna, he employs writing as a tool for effecting change within and beyond the text.
In Plato’s dialogues, the characters are often fundamentally change their opinion. And today, nearly 2,500 years after his death, the philosopher’s impact on the real world is clear. For example, today’s universities are collectively called “academies.” it was the name of Plato’s group, The first higher education institution in the West. The British scholar Alfred North Whitehead famously wrote that all Western philosophy is “a series of philosophies.” Footnotes to Plato”
Aristotle’s extensive writings also show that the purpose of writing goes beyond communication. in “rhetoricAristotle defines rhetoric as a way of “moving souls” rather than simply exchanging knowledge.
Therefore, for both Greek philosophers, writing meant transformation rather than information.
But today, Popularity of AI tools This may make the text less dynamic and moving. Using AI has risks “Branding” of textAccording to a study led by Computer Science Professor Natasha Jacks. In other words, much of today’s AI writing lacks a clear voice. make it sound the same – Possible make people think more aliketoo.
“Generator writing”
Overall, these three ancient writers agree that writing emerges from thought and experience, a process that seeks to create change. Enheduanna, Plato, and Aristotle agree that the essence of writing is transcendent. brief summary Information conveyance common to today’s AI outputs.
Even if AI can generate creative textthat writing may not be able to “move the soul” like human writing. In some studies, ‘Parent-person attribution bias” or”AI penaltyThis means that people prefer human writing, even if the AI writing is stylistically similar. People want to read what other people have written, not what algorithms feed them.
Perhaps we need another word for AI output. Common terms today include “generated content” and “synthetic text,” but I wondered if we could include something even simpler: AI itself. After a lot of ChatGPT prompts and tweaks, I settled on one word: “Generwrite.”
AI is here to stay, but new words could help distinguish between types of text. And, as Enheduanna, Plato, and Aristotle have reminded us, there is an element of writing that is always characteristic of a physical, thinking being striving to move the soul.
This article was first published conversation.
