John Warner's 'More Than Words: how to think about writing in the age of AI'

ChatGPT’s public release in November 2022 seemed to change everything, and it certainly had a dramatic effect on teachers. As John Warner writes, like people in many other professions, we started ‘freaking out’.

This looked like an existential threat to what we do. English teachers were certainly stunned: our text-based subject looked like being particularly exposed to tools based on massive Large Learning Models.

It is both cheering and brave that John Warner has written this book - cheering because we need intelligent people whose values are rock-solid to think about the issue, and brave because the technology is changing fast and, as he knows, he risks being out of date. He calls AI a ‘moving target’ and writes that as a result:

Rather than trying to predict the future of technology, this is a book about the things I know to be stable that ChatGPT cannot and will not change unless we lose sight of the unique human experience of writing.

Like Warner, I too have seen AI developments as 

an opportunity to reconsider exactly what we value and why we value those things.

That opportunity has made me more and more certain about the central principles of my subject, and about how AI must not pollute these (peripheral administrative use of teachers seems fine to me). As Warner shows in detail during the course of this book, there is a symbiotic relationship between thinking and writing, and those who imagine that an AI tool can write more than accurate and fluent prose are making a fundamental category error:

It mistakes product for process.

If I had to choose just one sentence in this book which stands for Warner’s central principle, it would be 

Writing is thinking.

This is precisely what the giddy tech-hypers fail to see. 

Warner lays out his stall in the first chapter, ‘Automation, Not Intelligence’, by stating that LLMs do not write: they (merely) generate syntax. AI tools like ChatGPT are not anywhere near human definitions of intelligence, fundamentally because whatever their developments or ‘advances’ they will always be machines.

He goes on to state more objections to AI: the technology’s unethical basis in the unauthorised use of intellectual property (shorter version: theft), its origins in exploited labour, its terrible environmental impact and its embedding of structural biases, particularly racism, sexism and ageism. That should all be more than enough for English teachers, as we stand in front of our classes hoping to guide children ethically. I think of the page on The Atlantic where you can search the LibGen database the pirated-books database that Meta used to train AI: I put in all the books by Irish writers on the current Leaving Certificate comparative fiction list: Young Skins by Colin Barrett, Days Without End by Sebastian Barry, Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan, Miss Emily by Nuala O’Connor and Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell were all plundered without permission.

In the second section, Warner looks at how writing (as opposed to syntax-generation) can only be human. This needs asserting again and again, especially to the children we teach. He gives a dismal example of the failure of AI-use from February 2023, when Michigan State University sent out a condolence statement following a mass shooting which was helped by ChatGPT (they acknowledged this openly!).

In Chapter 11, ‘Here Come the Teaching Machines (Again)’ Warner addresses the tedious old canard that technology can magically transform learning. Read Daisy Christodoulou on the history of this repeated failure; Audrey Watters has been onto this in her magnificently ferocious way for a long time, currently in ‘Second Breakfast’. AI has supercharged the zombie ideas in a way that makes the reaction to previous technologies seem almost reasonable and reasoned. He outlines his response to all this in the final section, ‘A Framework for Action: Resist, Renew, Explore:

Rather than providing a list of tips and tricks for dealing with generative AI (and perhaps whatever is coming next), I want to try to work through a way of thinking about this technology in the context of a goal of giving humans the space to live good lives alongside this alien presence.

To achieve this, we need to Resist by considering our root values, and that is certainly exactly what I am feeling right now as an English teacher of schoolchildren; we need to Renew our practice, for instance by using homework writing purposefully; and we can Explore areas in which the technology might enhance our lives on a ‘first do no harm’ basis.

There is much more in this book which will strike chords for English teachers, and in fact for teachers of all subjects. It is uplifting that someone as eloquent and deep-thinking as John Warner has so early in this revolution laid out for us so much good sense.