Generative AI: To err is human...

Recently, a professor emphasised that in the age of generative AI, proficiency in English, particularly a strong command of writing and articulation, may become more significant than coding itself. These observations highlighted how strong language skills are increasingly central to navigating the evolving relationship between AI, knowledge production and the marginalisation of human voices. This shift raises major concerns, as every individual begins producing highly polished and perfectly articulated expressions. This will lead to technological dependence and erosion of original ideas and also subtracts imperfections that make human writing soulful. 

This anxiety, which we are witnessing currently, is not new. In the work of Roald Dahl’s The Great Automatic Grammatizator (1953), Dahl imagines a machine capable of producing commercially successful literature automatically, eventually threatening the role of human writers. What appeared to be fictional and satirical in the 1950s looks perfectly relevant in the age of Gen-AI. Dahl’s version has paved the way for cultural and creative uproar, where creativity in the form of organic writing becomes an industrialised entity, questioning authorship, originality, and the absence of human expression. 

But beneath this technological advancement lies a deeper cultural question: what happens to the writing when perfection becomes automated? Science fiction writer Ted Chiang, in a now widely cited 2023 essay published in The New Yorker, equated ChatGPT to a blurry JPEG, which captures information in a general picture format while losing minute details. Generative content faces a major challenge: missing the original, raw voices and the struggle. The writing through the edges of the generative cushioning sounds convincing and polished, while the soul of the human experience begins to vanish. 

Authenticity and originality have been cornerstones of debate in the history of media and cultural thought. With the advancement of the printing press, the democratisation of written words gained momentum, and scholars became anxious about losing the uniqueness of ideas. The mass production of cultural artefact, critics complained, erodes unreproducible performance. This concern resonates with the ideas of German philosophers Theodor W Adorno and Max Horkheimer, who discussed the rise of the ‘culture industry’. They argued that the modern media industry tends to standardise culture, reflecting a similar pattern beneath the surface. Noted scholar Walter Benjamin described this loss of originality as the disappearance of “aura”. In each case, a new technological whirlwind in the relationship between the creator and the creation undergoes a mix of adaptations. French philosopher Jean Baudrillard conceptualised the idea of the “simulacrum”, a copy that no longer refers to any original. The idea is closely associated with AI writing an obituary, a grief column, or emotionally textured writing; it produces text that resembles human expression while divorcing it from human experience.

Human language has undergone a shift in the era of generative AI; it has not remained a medium for negotiating meaning but has become an input for rendering precise results. The more precisely you command, the more specific the output will be. The relationship with words is limited within the dominant frames of “prompt”, “output”, “query”, and “token”; these are engineering vocabularies, not human expression. This transformation is gradually changing the way people understand and use language. “Prompt effectively”, rather than writing clearly, has become the new craze among students and professionals. The precision of instruction is turning us into better operators, overshadowing the art of thoughtful human articulation and voice. The resistance of thoughtful articulation confines human organic creative spaces within the binary of patterns and machine neural networks. Generative writing produces flawless expression, which dilutes uncertainty and experimentation. An individual who relies on AI to generate a seamless text in the form of an essay or report has not only lost organic effort but has also ignored a journey of thoughtful intellectual engagement, relying heavily on this form of surrogate memory.

Within the ambit of journalism, fieldwork offers a distinctive role in witnessing firsthand experience; this process empowers the journalist to offer a civic language. AI-generated content in modern-day journalistic practices has severed the thread by diluting human experiences. Public discourse and journalism are intertwined; they are scaffolded on the fundamental principle of argument, which has a real human voice, and generative content weakens accountability to genuine convictions. So, if you are committing mistakes while writing, in this age of Gen AI, don’t shy away; rather, go on a deep dive into thoughtful engagement that will keep you soulful and humble. 

(The writer is an assistant professor at the Department of Media Studies, Christ University)