Artificial intelligence may be the most significant technological advance in writing since the invention of writing itself—which, as we do well to remember, was called into question by Plato in the Phaedrus through his myth of Thamus, the king who rejected writing when the god Theuth brought it as a gift to humankind. Thamus made this decision on the grounds that writing would not be a boon as promised, but a bane, because it would allow people to offload their rightful task of thinking, knowing, and remembering onto an external crutch, thereby encouraging the buildup of a false facsimile of real knowledge and wisdom.
As Neil Postman pointed out when discussing this myth, while it’s true that every technology involves some kind of trade-off, most of us would probably disagree with Thamus and hold instead that writing has constituted a profound net benefit for the human race.
Today, with the advent of large language models, we have arrived at another inflection point in the long history of our interactions with communications technologies, and we are once again called upon to make a judgment with serious consequences.
Writing is already a technology. The real question before us now is what this new technology of artificial intelligence does to the inward act that writing makes possible.