Technology has made our world wildly better in almost every way. We have offloaded many skills to machines like navigation, mathematical calculations, memory, and countless others. I see writing as a skill that may soon join the list. I would argue that writing (by humans) is worth preserving.
New technologies like large language models manifested through OpenAI's ChatGPT and Google's Bard can write better than some professional writers. With new upgrades to large language models coming soon, we may get Ernest Hemingway and Tom Wolf quality writing from a simple prompt. Will this make the laborious process of writing a thing of the past? Will we even need keyboards anymore? Like social media, I worry that a lack of writing will have a deleterious effect on the human brain.
We frequently hear that we are social animals and that we need interaction with other human beings to survive and thrive. An obvious part of socialization is speaking and writing. The root of our ability to speak and ultimately think is grounded in our ability to write. Writing is a foundational skill in improving clarity of thought. If we outsource our writing, will we outsource our ability to think clearly? It may sound extreme, but we do not always fully understand the follow-on effects of these powerful technologies.
Writing is fundamental to human flourishing. Writing develops critical thinking, creativity, and organization of thought. It is usually taught in school when we are about seven years old. If young people can simply prompt a LLM to write them their essays, are we doing them a disservice by allowing them in school? Will we be able to tell what good writing is if we cannot write? I worry that children in the future will not be taught how to write, but instead be taught how to prompt a LLM to think for them. Even if this is not explicit in education, the ease and quality of its use outside of the halls of education will make it ubiquitous.
As with so many things in our world today, we are entering an exciting new world. The only constant is that there is no constant. While LLM's can be used to edit and improve writing just as much as they can be used to replace writing, human beings are lazy, and I suspect most will elect to have the LLM's write for them if the quality is superior. I am no Luddite, but we need to be ready to adapt and be on the lookout to harness new technologies but also hold onto the age-old skills that make us fundamentally human. We need certain skills to interpret and think critically about the world. There is too much at stake to not be disciplined with our attention, and diligent in maintaining an educated society that can adapt to a rapidly changing world. Writing should be one of the skills we maintain and cherish as a human species, even if we are far outpaced by technology in that domain.