John Warner with Dave Eggers - More Than Words
Just before the start of the 2024 Summer Olympics, Google ran an ad for their generative AI chatbot Gemini. The ad depicts a father trying to help his daughter, a massive fan of Olympic hurdler Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone, improve her running technique. What begins with the father/daughter duo using Gemini to learn about hurdle training ends with them using it to write a “heartfelt” letter to Sydney herself. It is this point that elicited widespread public backlash so strong that Google ultimately pulled the ad. The assertion that technology could craft something so personal as a letter revealed a shared intrinsic discomfort with the idea that AI has the power to create as humans do.
In MORE THAN WORDS: How to Think About Writing in the Age of AI, veteran writing teacher and author of Why They Can’t Write: Killing the Five-Paragraph Essay and Other Necessities John Warner unpacks this feeling by deeply exploring what writing is and how the development of AI has impacted how we do it. Rather than seeing AI as entirely good or bad, Warner argues that the technology can be used as an effective lens to analyze writing. Warner defines writing as a process of thinking–discovering your ideas while trying to capture them on a page–and feeling–grappling with what it fundamentally means to be human. The fact that students are asked to complete so many assignments that a machine could do, such as the five-paragraph literature essay, is a sign that something has gone very wrong with writing instruction. Thus, MORE THAN WORDS calls for us to use AI as an opportunity to reckon with how we work with words–and how all of us should rethink our relationship with writing.
Given the speed of AI technological advancement and the lack of guidance on how we should be treating it, MORE THAN WORDS serves to open the conversation we should be having as a society about AI and its impact on creative endeavors. Drawing on deep research and his own experiences as a teacher and writer, Warner effectively shows how we might best use AI and what we lose when we trade efficiency for the process, experience, and reflection that is writing.
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