Whose Word Is It Anyway?

Like most curmudgeonly, change-hating techno-pessimists, I marked ChatGPT’s arrival in sorrow rather than joy. Here was an invention no one had asked for, that promised to upend perfectly good industries while further deadening the American intellect and locking in place the political biases of post-Covid Biden-crats. One could hardly read a newspaper without finding a promise that humanity would soon be freed from the drudgery of original thinking. Or was “artificial intelligence” going to turn us all into human fuel, the better to enact its secret schemes?

Given these priors, I ought to have greeted John Warner’s More Than Words: How to Think About Writing in the Age of AI with unqualified glee. A composition professor of 20 years’ experience and a columnist for the Chicago Tribune, Warner has written an anti-chatbot polemic that is as withering as it is merciless, a frontal assault on both the AI industry’s delusions of grandeur and its actual accomplishments. The book may as well have been conceived for an audience of one, so directly does it speak to my own preferences and passions. Yet it left me cold. The problem isn’t that Warner’s work is too cynical. It’s that it isn’t nearly cynical enough.