I learned about John Warner’s recent book, More Than Words: How to Think About Writing in the Age of AI, from a column in The Globe and Mail, and immediately ordered a copy. Generative AI has been a bur under the saddle of anyone who teaches (or tries to teach) writing to young people since ChatGPT went public in November 2022. Why should anyone learn to write when the machine does it better and faster? Well, the answer has become clear over the past three years: it isn’t better, and the cognitive deskilling that goes along with using that technology is a serious problem. I’ve talked to people my age who tell me they’re able to use generative AI as a tool, carefully and critically, and I believe them. However, the key phrase in that sentence is “my age”: they learned to write and think long before generative AI was released into the wild. The young people I teach might never gain those skills, which require practice and ongoing engagement, if they end up relying on a large language model and an algorithm to simulate their thinking.
Warner argues that writing is an embodied process of thinking and feeling. Since a database has no body, cannot think (although it can simulate thought), and doesn’t feel (emotions or sensations, with the exception of vision, perhaps), whatever it does, according to Warner’s definition, is not writing. What it does, instead, is regurgitate an average of anything that has been written on a particular subject in the past–whatever is in its database. It predicts what words belong together, based on what words have been linked in a chain of signification in the past. It can’t do anything new, just repeat what has already been said. The pastiche it spits out can’t be anything more than what’s already been said. No surprises. I’m not so naive as to think that my students are going to come up with unique and original ideas every time they write, although they do that more often than you might expect, but their ideas, even if they’ve already been thought, and their feelings, even if they’ve already been felt, will be unique and original to them. Besides, sometimes their ideas are original and new; we can’t forget that is a possibility. Generate AI robs us of the chance to express our uniqueness. Individuals, Warner points out, aren’t averages, but that’s all generative AI can produce.
In an earlier book, Why They Can’t Write: Killing the Five-Paragraph Essay and Other Necessities, Warner argues that writing and thinking are intimately connected. Writing is thinking. When we sit down to write, we’re not dumping premade thoughts into a text; we’re coming up with those thoughts, at least some of them, and working with them, testing, exploring, qualifying them. The problem with premade structures like the five-paragraph or “hamburger” essay is that they tend to block that process of exploration. In More Than Words, Warner applies that argument to generative AI. If all we want our students to produce is a five-paragraph essay, Warner argues, we might as well let them use generative AI (despite its horrendous environmental impact or its basis in the theft of writers’ intellectual property, issues which he also considers), because that prefabricated format is almost as far from what writing ought to be as ChatGPT is. Instead, what we need to do is give our students writing tasks that encourage exploration and thought, and not grade them based on how well whatever they come up with matches some pre-existing format. That way, they will come to understand that even using a chatbot to come up with ideas or an essay plan (both of which are essential parts of the thinking process involved in writing an essay) short circuits the notion of writing as thinking. Because writing is taught so badly–and that’s true here, as much as in the United States, where standardized testing is more important; I’ve seen many students who think writing means being bound by rigid rules and structures, like not using the pronoun “I” or having any number of paragraphs but five–students tend to see it as a boring, mechanical exercise divorced from self-expression. Attempts to use generative AI to teach writing double down on this mistaken approach, Warner contends.
Self-expression is at the centre of Warner’s argument. He describes writing as a communicative act that begins with an intention to tell somebody something. That intention, that desire to explain or argue or narrate, is a human impulse. ChatGPT can’t form an intention, because it operates according to an algorithm that predicts syntactic structures. If we want our students to resist the temptation to use that technology, we need to make sure they understand that we’re interested in what they have to say, what they intend to communicate. If they think they have nothing of value to offer, we need to assure them that they do.
Warner suggests ways he’s found ChatGPT useful for specific tasks. He asked it to give him a summary of Maryanne Wolf’s Proust and the Squid, for instance, a book he read almost 20 years before he was drafting this book and didn’t have time to reread, and apparently it did an acceptable job. I would’ve just reread Wolf’s introduction and first chapter and skimmed the rest to get the book back into my head, since I do not trust generative AI to do anything without bullshitting, to use Harry Frankfurt’s useful term, as Michael Townsen Hicks, James Humphries, and Joe Slater do in an article called “ChatGPT Is Bullshit,” but that’s just me. I guess Warner deserves some credit for looking at arguments and evidence that run contrary to his own.
At the end of his book, Warner provides suggestions about resisting generative AI, renewing our teaching and writing practices, and exploring the potential of this technology, since it’s probably here to stay. I’m with him on resistance and renewal, but life’s too short to get sucked into exploring generative AI. I’m not interested. I don’t want to spend any of the limited time I have left playing with ChatGPT. No thanks.
Anyhow, that’s my first book of 2026. I have another reading goal in mind for this year; maybe I’ll reach it, and maybe I won’t, but I’m going to make the attempt.