Writing and Artificial Intelligence

Abstract

This article reflects on a specific type of writing in the age of artificial intelligence—not writing in general, but rather writing in the social sciences and humanities (social sciences, communication, literary criticism, etc.). Contrary to the idea of an opposition between the human being and the machine, it seeks to establish a counterpoint between machine writing and writer’s writing. In this sense, what matters is not so much the use of the machine, but rather “how it writes” and “how we write without it,” since it is through the contrast between machine writing and human writing that certain processes inherent to the act of writing can be apprehended. Barthes states that writing is not the written text. This means that writing is a slow movement that unfolds through repetitions over a certain period of time. There is a subject who engages with the still-incomplete text. The machine writes, and its output is immediate (one of the meanings associated with the English word prompt), but the text is produced without the reflexivity and critique that characterize the movement of writing.