A Lasting Trace of Human Encounter

Why persist stringing words into lines for the allure of readers who are effortlessly ensnared by more skillful anglers?

Writing is a continuous struggle to find the most meaningful choice of terms, the concise turn of phrase, the appropriate metaphorical parallel. It all seems so futile when the expression of ideas can easily be surrendered to agents of artificial intelligence. Their access to information and fluency with language cannot be matched in speed or concision by feeble biological minds.

To resist this temptation is not an act of martyrdom. Sentences reveal more than meaning; they are evidence of its origin. Flawed linguistic attempts mark the process of wrestling experience into comprehensible form. To bypass the effort of creating language removes the last trace of life from the thought. It is an act of redemption, not sacrifice, to refuse.

This is not to say that grammatical imperfection has a virtuous quality simply because of its human origin. Flaws are not the goal, just the residue. Craft and clarity are idealized aspirations that endless revision rarely attains. To communicate a personal vision is like chasing an apparition and trying to capture it by description. Reality is ghostly this way.

Visual arts provide a useful analogy in this pursuit. Over time, painters learned techniques to enhance pictorial realism. They utilized linear perspective, object foreshortening, proportional scale, atmospheric light and color diffusion; effectively fooling the eye into believing what it could not actually see.

Photography eventually came along and offered a technology to transfer those reflections onto film with an authenticity unparalleled by human hand. Painting might have retreated in defeat, but realism was never the true target. Instead, it erupted to reveal the complexity of human perception beyond what had previously been realized.

Impressionism demonstrated how mere splashes of light and color imparted emotion to visual representation. Pointillism further deconstructed painting by forcing the eye to complete what the brush only suggested. Cubism asserted the coexistence of multiple simultaneous points of view. Surrealism pointed to the psychological sources of cognition. Abstract Expressionism illustrated that creation resides in the human gesture, not just the object.

The representation of reality was no longer confined to pictorial likeness. It resides in light, movement, distortion, memory, dream, or the incomplete process of perception itself. The painter does not detail every leaf of a tree, or ripple on the water. Each viewer completes them more imaginatively from the subtlest of hints. The omission is filtered attention, not absence.

This is where art often precedes philosophy. The artist stages a problem before the philosopher arrives to define it. Minimalism posed the unsettled question of where art is found. In the object? In the concept? In the institutional space? In the decision to add nothing more? In the focus of viewer attention? It does not reside in any singular location. Art is a dialogue among maker, viewer, tradition, and context. It is not merely the thing produced, but the field of awareness it attempts to create.

There is a time-honored tradition of education in art by the atelier method. It was rooted in Renaissance and later French practices that relied on the mentorship of a master working side-by side with apprentices in sharing their craft and techniques for producing paintings and sculptures. The studio of Rodin was a prime example in which sculptural works were prolifically produced by assistants under his guidance. Few ever questioned the authorship of a Rodin.

The atelier system of learning fell out of use in the Universities of the mid-20th century due to modernist trends emphasizing originality and conceptual ideas in place of traditional figurative works. But collaboration in art never waned. Chihuly is a more recent creator recognized by single appellation and renowned for directing teams of glassblowers producing large scale assemblages.

It is not a far stretch to imagine robotics assisting in the fabrication of art works. In fact, there are a number of cases where they have played various roles as part of the piece; but never before have they been confused with the creator.

Increasing levels of technical assistance have long been utilized in research and publication. Teachers and editors and peers have always been influential on the output of authors. Yet a tenuous taboo has arisen that is opposed to writers collaborating with large language models (LLMs).

Exactly where to draw the line between conception and creation is poorly defined. Continual improvement of technology threatens to disrupt the traditional process, not unlike the effect that photography had on painting. And like that earlier eventuality, writers are likely to adapt with similar creative alternatives.

No artist works in a vacuum. The Roman playwright, Terence, already acknowledged in antiquity that “nothing is ever said that has not been said before”. It has been restated in many places and many ways ever since. Perhaps the most colorful quote is attributed to Mark Twain in the biography written by Albert Paine:

“there is no such thing as a new idea. It is impossible. We simply take a lot of old ideas and put them into a sort of mental kaleidoscope. We give them a turn and they make new and curious combinations. We keep on turning and making new combinations indefinitely; but they are the same old pieces of colored glass that have been in use through all the ages”.

What distinguishes this process when performed by Mark Twain as compared with a large language model (LLM)? It works in the same way and certainly is capable of simulating Twain’s style. Yet we are plagued by articles instructing how to avoid the grammatical quirks common in texts by LLMs. I have never seen such a guide how not to write like Twain, or Hemmingway, or any other author recognized by a single name.

I don’t think stylistic characteristics are the real issue, as our living language is individually varied and actively evolving. One stated concern is to avoid any question of authorship, the substitution of passages the writer did not create. But there is an underlying worry beyond plagiarism about something deeper that may be lost through interaction with AI.

In the context of writing, AI can serve to amplify recursive reflection at the very root of human cognition, yet it does so by manipulating language without having undergone the physical pressures from which it emerges. The functional benefit infused by the friction of a laborious process is diminished without exercise. The risk of cognitive decline is a serious concern but is not a predetermined outcome. This isn’t the first technological convenience to have threatened our vitality, and cognitive workloads can be redirected toward other equivalent challenges.

The longer-term loss results from the proficiency with which AI eliminates the awkward sentence, the circling repetition, the analogy that reaches too far. These are not simply imperfect attempts at expression; they are the visible record of thought becoming language.

Never forget, there are two faces to every coin; the writer and the reader, the painter and the viewer, the producer and the consumer. When we focus on the subjective struggle it’s easy to forget the connected objective. Any discussion about one must consider the other. The reader is witnessing a mind giving form to a nascent, formerly ineffable perception, as it surrenders to the constraints of grammar.

The difficulty of creation alone is insufficient to demand respect from the observer. A tangled sentence is not deeper because it resists understanding. Some marks show the hand of the builder; others weaken the structure itself. The writer’s task is not to eliminate every fault, but to reveal the tactile grain of ideas to the reader, along with the splinters inherent in their assembly.

Syntax and semantics are the chords of modulation that reverberate in the author’s voice. Language is more than a delivery system for information; it is the lingering resonance of a human encounter with life. There is a special timbre to be heard in the words, an identifying fingerprint left like a pigmented hand shadow on a cave wall. In the writer’s effort to share an insight, the reader encounters the lasting trace of another consciousness trying to connect.