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— Written by San Choudhury

As a writer, I’ve recently felt an ineffable sense that writing has undergone a kind of devaluation.

We’ve all seen the critiques written about AI and its implications for writing. What had initially seemed to make writing easier, and therefore more accessible, is now increasingly treated with much suspicion. It has been suggested that in addition to getting rid of poor writing from our text-scape, AI is also industrialising mediocrity. One is not just able to produce technically correct and logically structured phrases, sentences, and paragraphs, but they can do so without expending much effort. What we now come across is an abundance of competent (read mechanistic), homogeneous, and thoroughly average outputs, but not so much ‘good’ writing which is experimental, original, and has some semblance of a ‘human voice’. In turn, the ability to produce average quality, ‘artificial’ writing at speed and scale has had consequences – what many are calling the destruction of the writing industry. Professional writers, for whom writing – both the act and its outputs – has been their bread and butter for some time, are understandably anxious. They appear to be fretting about the disappearance of writing jobs as these are instead increasingly assigned to those – machine or human – who are able to ‘optimise’ their writing workflows and can, therefore, produce texts cheap, quick, and with a little AI-trick. 

These anxieties are certainly not unfounded. As I peruse the feeds of Substack – what seems to be the contemporary intellectual’s playing field – the uncannily AI-sounding writing is hard to ignore. What surprised me more, however, was noticing the lengthy-but-lacking-in-essence comments fellow writers were leaving underneath one another’s posts! Elsewhere, video essays and talking-head content that flood our feeds, though spoken, often seem barely able to conceal the formulaic scripting beneath them. Yes, the internet does appear increasingly saturated with ‘AI slop’. Turn to almost any corner, and the endlessly repeated rhetorical formulas – perhaps the most infamous being “its not [this], its [that] – spill out like the meat from a Sloppy Joe. It's messy, it's a little bit unappealing, but it is slop – a lot of it – there to be consumed. 

Given this, it's not difficult to see why the blame for the devaluation of writing has landed squarely on the shoulders of AI. Writing, once understood as a craft requiring considerable time and effort to hone, can now be generated in ways not entirely dissimilar to the factory production of cheap goods. And, as the logic of supply and demand would have it, when something becomes radically abundant, its value often begins to decline. 

But I wonder whether there is something to be said for writing having undergone a process of devaluation long before AI had arrived. That is, I’m inclined to suggest that perhaps AI is not the cause of writing’s devaluation, but merely its culmination 

To make this argument, I want to turn our gaze toward writing in the context of academia.