I teach writing and rhetoric, and my undergraduate students and I often overlook a surprisingly complex question: “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, the first named writer on record, to Plato and Aristotle, writing has been described and defined in ways that suggest 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. Although she is known as the earliest known writer, the authorship of her poems and hymns is debated.
One of her poems, “The 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.
First, the poem praises the ancient Mesopotamian goddess Inanna, who was associated with powers such as fertility and war. “My lady, you are the guardian of all greatness,” Enheduanna says in Jane Hirshfield’s translation.
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 the translation by Sophos Helle, the 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 reinstated Enheduanna to his post. But historians have little evidence as to whether expulsion and return really occurred.
However, her poetry had a real-world impact and helped create religious and political unity in the world’s first empire. For example, her writings fused the Sumerian goddess Inanna and the Akkadian goddess Ishtar to depict a single “Queen of Heaven.”
AI writing can be used to create change, such as influencing 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.
Plato famously defined writing as a poor copy of speech in his Phaedrus, which discussed the relationship between love and rhetoric. The task of speech is to express thoughts. Thought represents knowledge and truth. Similarly, Aristotle wrote, “The spoken word is a symbol of spiritual experience, and the written word is a symbol of the spoken word.”
Even that definition presents a stark contrast to AI, which lacks 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 over writing, he suggests in the Phaedrus that good writing can lead learners to truth and knowledge. Like Enheduanna, he employs writing as a tool for effecting change within and beyond the text.
In Plato’s dialogues, characters often radically change their opinions. 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.” This is because it was the name of Plato’s group, the first Western institutions of higher learning. The British scholar Alfred North Whitehead famously wrote that all Western philosophy is “a series of footnotes to Plato.”
Aristotle’s extensive writings also show that the purpose of writing goes beyond communication. For example, in Rhetoric, he explains in detail how to make your writing persuasive. Aristotle defines rhetoric as not just the exchange of knowledge, but a way to “move the soul.”
Therefore, for both Greek philosophers, writing meant transformation rather than information.
But today, with the proliferation of AI tools, writing can become less dynamic and moving. A study led by computer science professor Natasha Jacks found that the use of AI risks “whitening” texts. In other words, much of today’s AI writing lacks a distinct voice and ends up sounding the same. This could also make people think more alike.
“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 also agree that the nature of writing goes beyond the simple summaries and information transfers common in today’s AI output.
AI can generate creative sentences, but those sentences may not be able to “move the soul” in the same way that human writing can. Some studies have shown “human attribution bias” or “AI penalty.” This 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.
Ryan Leake, Assistant Professor of Writing (Education); USC Dornsaif College of Letters, Arts and Sciences
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
