Writer’s block may be a thing of the past. Through the interface of a chatbot, a writer can now dip their ink into the collective knowledge of humanity and extract whatever insights they seek. Every thought can be completed, every question answered, every idea elaborated.
Autocomplete itself isn’t a new phenomenon, but it has come a long way since the nascent efforts of predictive text (a form of autocorrection), and Gmail’s ‘Smart Reply’ and ‘Smart Compose’, rolled out in quick succession in 2017-2018, which offer to complete sentences and can finish your own.
Powered by large language models such as GPT-3, chatbots are moving past critiques of their dry, monotonous tone. These models have the ability to generate outputs that appear human-like. As chatbots incorporate techniques such as style transfer, they will even learn to mimic our own individual writing voice.
AI-powered writing assistants promise to take matters a step further by eradicating the struggle of writing. Take Lex, a word editor that will finish your semi-formed sentences at the drop of a hat (more precisely, at the tap of +++). Here it is with an alternative to my opening paragraph – my only contribution is the part in bold:
This form of autocomplete is designed to solve the problem, according to Lex creator Nathan Baschez, of being ‘stuck’ and not knowing what to write next. By completing your sentences, Lex ‘keeps you in the writing flow’, unimpeded by external distractions or unproductive internal musings. The same is claimed for Jasper, ‘a new way to beat writer’s block’, according to CEO Dave Rogenmoser. Here, the promise is to autoinitiate your writing: you simply jot down a blog post title, identify your audience, tone of voice and language through drop-down menus, and Jasper will produce multiple versions of an opening paragraph for your blog. The blank page dilemma is no more!
Tools like Lex and Jasper, and a wealth of others such as Sudowrite that target fiction writing, mean we are only ever a keyboard peck away from plugging the gaps in our written thoughts. Perhaps we can retire the cliche of the tortured artist and look forward to unleashing a ceaseless burst of creativity without toil or wasted effort.
If only writing were that simple.
The current crop of AI writing tools, in their attempts to expunge struggle from the writing process, miss two key insights:
1. Writing is thinking, and thinking is writing
The challenges of writing are intellectual as much as psychological, involving a process of sifting through our confusions – about what we think, what we should be thinking, or what others might be thinking. This process
