Source of book: Borrowed from the library
I discovered John Warner (who has a column with the Chicago Tribune as well as an excellent blog) through Peter Greene, who writes about education and education policy. You should check out Warner’s blog as well, which covers a lot of territory from a thoughtful, progressive viewpoint.
Warner is a busy man, teaching creative writing at College of Charleston, and editing the delightful internet humor site, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency.
More Than Words is all about writing and AI, and is as good as anything I have read. Warner keeps an even tone, a fair and open mind, but also refuses to back down on his core points.
I personally believe that AI is a huge bubble right now, and will crash and burn pretty spectacularly before too much longer. It is mostly hype - as bubbles are - and makes wild promises that it cannot deliver and will never deliver using its current form.
It’s not a matter of adding ever-increasing processing power. The whole premise that LLMs are “intelligence” in any meaningful sense is just straight up bullshit.
For Warner, who teaches writing, anything that an AI can do isn’t actual writing - it’s an automation, just like a robot assembling widgets.
Writing requires thinking, not mere grammatical assembly, which is a distinctly human process. AI doesn’t think - it literally has no idea of meaning. It instead predicts how actual humans would string together words. Which is not only why it is prone to “hallucinations” - GIGO applies here - but why it cannot actually evaluate truth at all. It has no concept of it because it does not understand what it is saying.
Warner correctly notes that “AI” is false advertising. It isn’t “intelligence” at all - it is automation.
That can’t be fixed by more computing power. It would require a completely different approach and level of technology that isn’t even being pursued right now.
In case it wasn’t obvious, this blog is not written by AI. It is written by me, the Autodidact, personally. I also do not use AI to summarize the books I read - I personally read them, take notes, and write about my thoughts.
Yes, I use the internet to look stuff up - I try to support things with evidence when needed. But that is a tool, not the source of my writing itself.
Like Warner, I believe that the fundamental purpose of writing - indeed language itself - is to communicate with other humans. Sure, language is imperfect, and communication can never be complete. But the very process of communication is key to human society, empathy, and so much else.
For Warner, this goes both ways. Students should not be expected to take things more seriously than teachers. If a teacher is going to use a computer program to evaluate a paper, for example, the student will correctly understand that using a computer program to write the paper is the same thing. It’s just machines talking to machines at that point. Which is why, in my own Wills and Trusts class, I tell my students that I will be personally reading everything, so write with the intent of communicating to me. I will respect them enough to read what they write.
This leads into the issue of what “writing” actually matters. Too much of writing (and I include the law school essays we all have to assign in preparation for the bar exam) is fake. It is more about reproducing a format than actually thinking. Which is why AI can actually do it. The same applies to many school assignments, which are a temptation for cheating because they are essentially meaningless.
My students had been incentivized not to write but instead to produce writing-related simulations, formulaic responses for the purpose of passing standardized assessments. This happens not because teachers are bad or students lack ability but because these simulations have been privileged in a system where “schooling” is divorced from “learning.”
I could not agree more. Warner goes on to note that what he can learn from AI is which assignments actually mean something. If AI can do it, it is meaningless.
[Note here: I want to call out my longtime musical colleague and my kids’ history teacher Ernie for his approach to essays - students pick the topic themselves from the study topics of that month, and write what they want about it. My kids confirm that they learned so much about actual writing and thinking from the freedom - and the feedback from their teacher.]
In my ongoing quest to make the experience of writing meaningful for students, for teachers, for those at work, and for those at play, I see ChatGPT as an ally. If ChatGPT can do something, then that thing probably doesn’t need to be done by a human being. It quite possibly doesn’t need to be done period.
The challenge is to figure out where humans are necessary.
What writing should be is an expression of our humanity, not mechanical assembly of words.
It is frankly bizarre to me that many people find the outsourcing of their own humanity to AI attractive. It is akin to promising to automate our most intimate and meaningful experiences, like outsourcing the love you have for your family because going through the hassle of the times your loved ones try your spirit isn’t worth the trouble.
And further:
Generating syntax is not the same thing as writing. Writing is an embodied act of thinking and feeling. Writing is communicating with intention.
This next passage captures a lot of my own experience blogging - having written over 1500 posts over a 15 year period - where my thinking is transformed by the acts of reading and writing.
Writing is thinking. Writing involves both the expression and exploration of an idea, meaning that even as we’re trying to capture the idea on the page, the idea may change based on our attempts to capture it. Removing thinking from writing renders an act not writing.
Writing is also feeling, a way for us to be invested and involved not only in our own lives but the lives of others and the world around us.
Reading and writing are inextricable, and outsourcing our reading to AI is essentially a choice to give up on being human.
Warner does an excellent job of debunking the hype about what AI is. It does not think. It does not evaluate. It does not consider. It has no memory. It has no intention. It is automation, nothing more, and nothing less.
Large language models do not “write.” They generate syntax. They do not think, feel, or experience anything. They are fundamentally incapable of judging truth, accuracy, or veracity. Any actions that look like the exercise of judgment are illusory. While the term hallucination has come to mean outputs from LLMs that are incorrect or untrue, it is arguably more accurate to say that from the point of view of the LLM, everything is a hallucination, as it has no reference points from which to judge its own production. ChatGPT is fundamentally as “bullshitter” as defined by Harry Frankfort in his classic treatise on the term (On Bullshit), something “unconnected to concern for the truth.” It’s not that ChatGPT makes stuff up. It has no capacity for discerning something true from something not true. Truth is irrelevant to its operations.
Totally recommend reading the Frankfort book, by the way.
One of the weirdest passages in the book looks at the parallel between people who consult psychics and those who consult AI. Both require a belief in the underlying illusion, that psychics really can see the future, and that AI is intelligent.
Neither is true. Rather, as Warner suggests, “The intelligence illusion is in the mind of the user and not in the LLM itself.”
Having established that AI is just another automation, Warner cites Emily Bender (an AI researcher), who notes that “AI” is a misnomer - and that we should use the correct description of “automation” and ask the hard questions: what is being automated, why, and who benefits. And also if it actually does the job expected (usually no), who is harmed, who is legally and financially responsible for the harm, and how will we regulate that.
These are the real questions we need to be asking. And also how to mitigate the environmental destruction AI is causing through its ludicrously high consumption of water and power.
Throughout the book, Warner talks about his own experiences, and he does tell a good story. One that I particularly loved was his description of kindergarten, which largely matches my own.
Thanks to my ability to get through a Dr. Seuss book on my own, I started kindergarten with my age cohort, knowing my ABCs and even my XYZs upon entry, while struggling mightily to learn how to tie my shoes and zip my coat, facts made apparent by being the last to receive his gold stars on the class accomplishment poster board kept by my teacher.
Did anyone else have that poster board? Yep, I struggled with physical coordination, yet I was reading at the chapter book level by first grade. I was also the shortest kid in my class, and it wasn’t close. Sigh.
Part of the point of the story is that Warner is not opposed to automation or technology in writing, per se. Like me, he hated cursive, and struggled with it. Discovering typing was a game changer for both of us.
For the first time, I experienced what it was like to capture my thoughts at close to the speed in which they occurred.
YES!!
I’m also on board with Warner’s evaluation of cursive, which I have never used since Jr. High. (I type for work daily, though…)
Those who argue that cursive is a route to teaching fine motor skills - not for me, but okay - don’t similarly argue for, [Anne] Trubek’s words, “more useful” skills “such as cooking, sewing, and carpentry.” The calls for the return to cursive appear to be wrapped up more in a kind of cultural anxiety, weirdly attached to a feeling of tradition-rooted patriotism more than any practical, demonstrable benefit to students. One of the common laments of the pro-cursive crowd is that students can no longer read the Declaration of Independence in its original documentation, suggesting the power of the document is in the penmanship rather than the ideas.
So, the problem isn’t automation - Warner also notes spell check and the delete key in a word processor as key to his writing process - but the automation of the thinking needed for writing.
We tend to think of writing as the act of assembling words, but it’s a deeper experience than this. Words may be symbols, but they are not abstractions; they are the method by which we express our ideas. Lots of the writing students produce in school contexts is untethered from ideas, which is one of the reasons writing in school has become so alienating. Without an underlying idea, the words have no importance and very little genuine meaning.
In my own writing, I find that Warner’s description of ideas and thoughts coming long before words and sentences to accurate. Each of my posts starts there, before the words go on the page screen.
I have yet to meet a writer who thinks in sentences. First, there is thought - be that an image, an idea, a notion, or whatever - and only then are there words. Often in writing, the final specifics of the words used to express the ideas and capture the thinking are the last part of the process.
The chapter on writing as feeling is particularly excellent. I am an emotional person, as I have increasingly come to understand as I have grown older, and a lot of my writing isn’t primarily about intellect, but about processing my emotions, putting down in words my experience of being human.
Warner recounts the scandal around the AI condolence statement put out after a school mass shooting. As he correctly notes, our focus on “thoughts and prayers” rather than substantive responses leads to a situation where boilerplate is all that can be said.
Maybe because outsourcing expression following tragedy to tools of automation is the kind of thing that happens in a faceless dystopia.
I also have to talk about the chapter on writing as a practice, because of a great story. Warner signed up for Hello Fresh at one point, thinking that it would teach him to cook.
It didn’t.
He soon found out that it was a “meal prep” service, but that the art (and practice) of cooking can’t be put in simple instructions. It takes time, practice, and “feel.” I’m a pretty decent cook, because I started learning as a little kid and cook regularly. This constant practice over years has given me a comfort level in a kitchen - or on the trail - with the art of making delicious food.
Ditto for writing.
The best line in the story is, “I am half-convinced that there is some kind of cooking industry-wide conspiracy about how long it really takes to brown onions because not once in my life has it happened according to the prescribed time.”
Warner is correct. Nearly all cookbooks are bullshit about this. It legitimately takes 45 minutes to properly brown onions. The two honest writers are Jeff Smith (The Frugal Gourmet) and Julia Child. That’s literally the list. Plan accordingly. It is worth it for that sweet stickiness of properly caramelized onions. Trust me on this.
Also great in this chapter are the takedowns of two cultural myths. The first is the “10,000 hour rule.” As much as I love Malcolm Gladwell, I agree that this is a myth. The number of hours isn’t nearly as important as how you spend them. As a violinist, I have put in those hours. Sometimes they were productive, other times not. Learning how to be productive is also a practice and an art, which is why a good teacher is so necessary.
The other is “Grit.” All my kids had to read this, and they found it tedious. Warner notes that in many cases, “Grit” can cause you to waste time on something you hate rather than following the better path for one’s talents.
His analysis of the problem is interesting.
The 10,000 Hour Rule and Duckworth’s grit theory are manifestations of a particularly American attitude toward self-improvement that a better live is right around the corner if you can simply identify and embrace “one true thing.”
Warner applies this to educational fads - which is definitely a thing. Because there is not in fact “one true thing” that solves problems.
I am reminded of one of Bill Gothard’s false teachings here. After starting with pop-psyche “self-acceptance” that really wasn’t that at all, and going through the core of his system, which was authoritarianism of parents over children and the powerful over the weak, he ended with his principle of “success.” His “one true thing.”
What was it? Well, just apply his method of meditating on scripture and God will make you a success in everything you do.
Yep, a lazy proof-text, a “one true thing,” and really utter bullshit. There is nothing about contemplating an ancient holy book that is magic and leads to success. You still need to get off your ass, learn useful knowledge and skills, and do the work. This is why too many of the “graduates” from Gothard’s system have zero employable skills, zero social skills, and zero ability to function in an actual human society. (And the ones that did acquire those skills did so in spite of Gothard’s useless curriculum, not because of it.)
Warner closes the chapter with a solid argument that it isn’t genius that matters - it is skills acquired through practice - in his case, his ability to write by thinking and expressing those thoughts in words. I resonated with his description of himself too.
I will know that in terms of intellectual firepower, I’m reasonably armed, but not tremendously gifted. In my various travels, I have intersected with genuinely brilliant and uncommonly creative people, and I know I am not them…I am, happily, entirely ordinary in just about every way.
But I have my writing practice, and that matters.
Yep, that’s me. I’m pretty ordinary, no genius by any definition. Reasonably armed is all, with the practice of using words to communicate.
The chapter on the problems with how we teach reading and writing at the primary school level is good as well. I too have been frustrated with how little my kids have been expected to read. It’s almost all excerpts, not whole books. My kids will be fine - they have been readers since they were young, and devour books. But I do not think this focus on “teaching to the test” is a good idea.
This kind of relationship to reading is unfortunately foreign to increasing numbers of young people who have been subjected to a school curriculum in which they are primarily exposed to short texts or excerpts of longer ones and then asked the kind of surface-level questions that are appropriate to multiple choice standardized assessments. Deep reading is largely absent from the student reading diet because it is harder to assess against the standards that have come to dominate the curriculum.
Another chapter is on the endless attempts (dating back a surprisingly long time) to replace teachers with machines. And yes, B. F. Skinner is mentioned. (I found his utopian novel to be fascinating, but not a little creepy.)
In the 1950s, B. F. Skinner, the godfather of behaviorism, was similarly obsessed with the creation of a teaching machine, convinced that children could better learn if they were simply treated like the pigeons he had used to test his theories on the importance of immediate feedback and reward…Despite decades of attempts, Skinner’s machine never caught on. Skinner blamed schools, teachers, even manufacturers for this failure, never considering that perhaps children and not the same as pigeons.
A perhaps related concept is the way that Skinner’s ideas were borrowed by Religious Authoritarian Parenting gurus, with similar failures to accomplish the goal. Children are not pigeons. Humans learn socially, not just by instruction. And teaching is a process of adapting to the individual students and their learning styles and needs.
Warner makes another good point, even more relevant in an era when teachers are increasingly devalued by the American Right:
It is not coincidental that teaching was (and still is) a female-dominated profession, while the engineering boom of the 1950s and 1960s was almost exclusively the province of men. This disrespect for teaching rooted in mid-twentieth-century sexism continues to be manifested today as teachers are subjected to an ever-changing list of demands without being given the time and resources necessary to do the job.
But clearly, AI designed by misogynistic tech-bros can replace those expendable female teachers, right?
Warner goes further when it comes to teaching and education. The problem is long-standing, and it is a misunderstanding - often willful - of the purpose of education. Like so many horrible things, this one dates to the Reagan administration and a report on education.
The report established an ethos suggesting the underlying purpose of an education is to secure material advantage in the competition against others, be they individuals in the marketplace or foreign nations on the world stage. The dominant purpose of school would be to rank and sort students against standards and one another. These rankings would be used to determine not only which students were worthy but which schools and teachers were operating effectively as well.
This has led to endless testing and standards and paperwork and teaching-to-the-test. Warner notes Campbell’s Law: when a quantitative measure is used for social decision-making, it will itself distort and corrupt the processes it is intended to monitor. The testing ruins the teaching.
Campbell’s law manifests itself in schools through the use and abuse of standardized tests, where the scores on those tests come to stand in for learning, no matter what methods have been deployed in the service of raising those scores. Rather than being a tool to gauge students’ cognitive abilities, tests have become an exercise in seeing how well you do on the test.
By the way, I am saying this as someone who is pretty good at taking tests. It isn’t the same as knowing things - which I also aim for, of course.
Warner returns to how this fits with reading and writing.
Unlike the featureless texts that ChatGPT churns out, human writing is spiky, weird, and messy. This is particularly true when we are in the midst of trying to figure stuff out through writing, which is always going to be the case with students. If I wanted my students to become confident writers, I had to let them write, and if I was going to let them write, I had to value something other than the ability to BS proficiently.
As I noted at the beginning, Warner isn’t a reactionary. He consciously avoids the “kids can’t read these days” narrative, for example. He also tries not to get too involved in the specifics of teaching techniques. He trusts teachers.
I am on his side with the so-called “reading wars,” however. So much of the last, well 50+ years have been spent on the Phonics jihadists waging scorched-earth war on everyone else. My poor mom was disabused of this notion early, because not only was I a quick reader, I memorized words. Sure, I can sound words out. But I didn’t need to always. (Also, I am dyslexic, and in practice read fairly fast by going with word shapes rather than sounds. It’s how I read.) Regarding the recent fad of “science of reading” which has become more of a brand name than an evidence-based approach - again, note the “one true thing” belief rearing its ugly head here once again…
I am a conscientious objector to this war, which has taken on a bizarre cultural-conflict flavor, where people genuinely interested in exploring how to best help students learn to read have been infiltrated by political forces who never miss a chance to undermine the public’s faith toward public schools. When a group both champions the science of reading and banning books, it seems clear they are not acting out of a passion for phonics.
And, of course, there is a shit-load of money to be made selling new curriculum.
These canned curriculums are extremely profitable for the educational publishers who provide them, but one-size-fits-all mandates ignore that different individuals learn to read differently. Yes, phonics are key for lots of readers, but not for every reader. Some students arrive in school already having surpassed what basic phonics instruction can do for them, while others need to build knowledge from scratch.
Let me note here that this is one thing I did love about being homeschooled, and why we did that for our kids when they were young. Everyone learns differently, and school can tend to be lock-step particularly in those formative years when kids learn at different rates. I’ll mention here that my brother was a delayed reader - he didn’t learn until age 7. But these days, he is one of my sources for book recommendations because he reads widely and thoughtfully. A regular school probably would have labeled him as “special needs” rather than wait for his brain to develop at its own pace.
I also have to mention the excellent chapter on “content” versus “writing.” My blog aspires to be writing, not mere content. Which is why it has to be written by a human. AI can - and increasingly does - create “content.
One of the most immediate and potentially damaging consequences of generative AI is its potential to drown us in content whose only purpose is to capture clicks to generate revenue through online advertising. If this sounds like your current experience of the internet, get ready for it to become significantly worse.
To fight that, well, subscribe to real writers, such as Warner. (And perhaps Yours Truly as well.)
I will mention the chapter on the challenges of compensation for writing, which Warner notes is nothing new - it dates back to the invention of writing actually. But this issue of “content” is a challenge for real writers who want to, you know, make a living and all. Warner has some genuinely good suggestions for this, and optimism that writers and readers will always be in demand. I think (and hope) he is right.
Quite a bit of fun for me was the chapter on how AI writes. Warner asks ChatGPT to write an article on a topic “in the style of John Warner.” The AI has plenty to work off of - Warner is a prolific writer.
But the result is….weird. Warner analyzes why it has some surface characteristics of his writing, but none of the substance. And also weird errors like words he never uses, and over-emotionality which clearly show a difference with his actual style.
As he puts it, there is a serious “uncanny valley” effect. I think that is absolutely correct - I find I can identify AI writing fairly quickly, and it is for that reason. It shows human features, but is clearly also not human.
Because thought is the most important part of writing, Warner notes that he cannot really teach anything meaningful to a student who does a draft using AI.
If a student comes to me with a text that has been generated by an AI, we have nothing to talk about, because we cannot discuss what it is they want to say, because they have yet to say anything.
Also in this chapter is a hilarious example of AI trying (and failing) to write in an author’s style. Warner quotes a brilliant description from David Foster Wallace’s hilarious tour-de-force that is “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again.” It is amazing, and one reason why I loved the original.
The GPT-4 imitation is so laughably bad. Beyond bad. It is oddly flat and uninspiring. It has no life. The words are sort of close in a horseshoes sort of way, but they aren’t quite right.
I won’t quote the passages, but if you read the book, you will totally get it.
The last part of the book is about how Warner thinks we can fight back against AI, and its creeping dehumanization of writing and reading. As he notes, this risks being dated, as technology will have changed by the time the book was published.
But actually, I think that his prescriptions hold up well, and apply not just to AI, but to so much of what is horrible and dehumanizing about late-stage, corporate capitalism in general. It is all dehumanizing, the endless monetization, the homogenization, the lack of actual human soul.
Warner notes throughout the book that the only reason AI is able to find a niche is that we have already abandoned our humanity in so many ways. He doesn’t mention it, but since he wrote the book, popular songs in Country Music and CCM are both AI generated. The reason these two genres are the first to go this way is that both have been formulaic for decades. The same cliches, the same sounds, the same pablum. Sure, there are gems to be found, but they are the exception.
To reclaim this, we need to focus on our humanity, and use our imagination and ability to connect with others.
To figure this out, I realized I had to stop thinking about AI and start thinking about humanity.
The fact is, we are embodied. We live our lives through a series of experiences rooted in a community of fellow humans. If we are machines, the way we are machines is not meaningful to the joys and sorrows of what it means to exist as sentient creatures.
I’ll close with one of Warner’s thoughts that to me seems profound. It’s not just about AI. It is about the way too many of us outsource our humanity to others. In the context of the Fundamentalist subculture I escaped from, it is an outsourcing of even morality itself. But it is more than just an ethics thing, it is all about true humanity, which cannot exist outside of community and empathy and messiness. Warner points out that while guides can be helpful, ultimately, we all have to do the difficult and messy work of becoming human ourselves.
It is important not to mistake a guide for an all-knowing sage. While it is tempting to wholly outsource the difficult work of continuously re-forming our own worldviews, letting weirdos like Joe Rogan or Jordan Peterson, or even non-weirdos like Brene Brown, substitute for your own judgment weighed against your values is a recipe for confusion and disappointment.
This is the risk, not just of turning human communication over to automation in the form of AI, but of outsourcing the things that make us human to “experts,” be they digital or other humans. To truly live, to truly be, to truly experience what it means to be a social animal we call human, we have to do the messy work of continuously adjusting, learning, growing, connecting.
Our human superpower truly is language, and to turn that power over to a non-human automaton is to lose something important. Warner’s book is all about that: an encouragement to remain human, and refuse to give away what makes us what we are.
No comments:
Post a Comment