Everyone has the same ghostwriter now

There is a word that gives away the use of ChatGPT in writing almost immediately: "quietly”.

Nothing ever simply happens anymore. A friendship does not end; it quietly dissolves. A woman does not become angry; she quietly begins to understand her own power. A company does not fire half its staff; it quietly reshapes the future of work.

Yet we let it reside between our paragraphs explicitly, almost brandishing the truth of the words having come…not from us.

Let’s talk about it.

The world, as I perceive it, is divided into roughly three camps on AI.

The first contains the people building AI, who insist that whatever apocalypse eventually accompanies it is merely the cost of progress. Big Tech pours incomprehensible sums of money into AI because this is where the money is moving.

Around that power, governments buy in stakes, which gives way for conspiracy theories to flourish.

A horrifying one I heard from a self-proclaimed “whistleblower” recently:
AI data centres are stripping the earth of water because water scarcity will eventually allow tech companies to achieve complete control over human life. Weaponise water for gain, for the final bosses of Silicon Valley to win.

Ugh.

Then there is the second camp, for whom nearly every act of writing, speaking, and thinking is a declaration of resistance. They are visibly and vocally anti-AI. They announce that their photographs are unedited, their art is hand-drawn, and their essays and emails are purely thumb and conviction. You can spot this camp from afar because they want you to know they exist. And I know this less incidentally, and more so because I am one of them.

The third camp is much larger and the subject of this piece. These are the utilitarians, who do not want the Earth stripped of water or language stripped of personality, but they pay for ChatGPT the way they pay for Netflix. It is merely a subscription of convenience. They make the perfect consumer for AI, using it for meeting notes, breakup texts and, as my friend tells me, to ask whether they’d get sick from the four-day-old sandwich they just ate.

But what intrigues me most about these non-evangelists is the spin of reclamation that they seem to have put on human performativity.

I know…bear with me.

You see, we’re told that almost all of human life is performance. Relationships have their performances. Workplaces certainly do. And we appear differently depending on who is in the room. All in all, enormous amounts of energy are spent arranging ourselves into the people we would like others to think we are.

The act of writing, or the appearance of being well-spoken, too, had always been part of that arrangement. We laboured over a sentence to seem intelligent but not unbearable. Or deleted a joke when it sounds too eager. Or replaced a shorter word with a longer one because having a good vocabulary is hot. We performed naturalness with great care. Until now.

Now we type up a piece where quietly appears a few times, and we hit publish. And with it, all acts and performances cease.

With AI in the picture, something peculiar has happened. People paste in entire paragraphs containing every known marker of GPT language and send them into the world without so much as disturbing the upholstery.

“Quietly.”

“Not only this, but also that”.

A series of sentences that are each four words long.

Unwarranted, involuntary retirement of the glorious em dash.

Now, do not mistake this for me yearning for a return of performance. I am only curious, and Substack seems to be a good place to be.

And I acknowledge that language has always contained habits and clichés. Human beings copied each other long before machines learned to copy us. So there is no version of prose or poetry untouched by influence.

Hence, what surprises me is not that people use AI to write. The incentives stare us in the face. What surprises me is how little effort many people make to conceal its utility, particularly in a culture otherwise obsessed with the performance of authenticity.

We still edit our faces before posting them and spend money making homes appear effortlessly chic. Politicians still rehearse sincerity. Yet, the way we tell stories is now meant to be our single, most unoriginal act?

Or is it that AI has become ordinary enough that hiding it feels unnecessary? I mean, I neither shy away nor announce that I need a calculator around my other mathematically brilliant friends.

That comparison is imperfect, of course. A calculator does not imitate voice, hallucinate, consume water bodies at large, or flatten expression into recognisable patterns. But you get my drift.

So if convenience has finally outshone the pressure (and pleasure) of uniqueness and everyone’s okay to skim-read GPT word soup, then perhaps that indifference could be put to better use elsewhere. For instance, in not expecting people to distinguish themselves in their jobs, looks, income, legacy, racial superiority and almost every other part of life.

But if we are unwilling to begin “blending in” elsewhere, then I am not sure why we should be in such a hurry to let written expression do so.