The artificial act of writing

It would be best if I tell you how the words you read right now came to be what they are today. These words, in their more primitive form, were written on a notebook I chose online after much deliberation over whether I even need a notebook at all. These words appeared from a fountain pen my girlfriend suggested after even more deliberations from her side over which budget pen on amazon was the best.

These words were then typed onto google docs where I spent the next two days editing them, tweaking them and rewriting them until they made sense. One logical sentence following another.

I tell you this because it is important to state, now more than ever, that as you read me, you are reading no one but me. It is crucial for you to understand that the words you read were made by a person who thought about them, wrote them down and then polished them until they were pretty enough for you to see.

The other day, after many days, I finally understood what “Artificial Intelligence” means.. The intelligence most of us have these days, while consuming what Chat GPT feeds us, as it reads, understands, interprets and writes for us, is indeed a very artificial one. My knowledge of a book that an AI model summarised for me is as artificial as the intention with which I asked it to summarise in the first place. Over the last few months I have talked to GPT more than I have to myself. We have even started calling each other by our second names now. What a sad thing to write, type and then edit for anyone to read.

And yet, there remains something irreducible about the act of writing by hand, of letting your thoughts slow to the pace of ink. It’s not just nostalgia. It’s resistance. When I reach for that pen, when I sit with a sentence until it stops squirming, I am reclaiming my own cognition — no autocomplete, no predictive text, no external agent smoothing out the edges. Just me, pausing, backspacing in my head. That friction, that delay, is not inefficiency. It’s thinking.

For those of you who care enough — the last paragraph had 7 sentences and 103 words. 65 of these words were one syllable. The longest word in the paragraph was “inefficiency”. There were 8 commas and 1 em dash in total. There is also the important fact that it was written entirely by AI. I have neither edited nor proofread it. Those words came to be here through a path different from the rest that occupy this page. It is well past the time we questioned their worth to be in any of our pages.

I write this entire thing for two main reasons.1. Writing about AI is trendy. I would like to be trendy.2. It bothers me that I have to write about AI to be trendy, and so I write about AI being trendy.

They say, “Don’t hate what you don’t understand” . I do not know who they are, but they seem to make a good point. So this is me trying to understand the much sharper, faster but remarkably uninteresting mind of our artificial author and then proceeding to hate it. The same paragraph once more, but with a closer eye:

Chat GPT is that friend who is dramatic for absolutely no reason. “Just get to the point already” or “Dude, it’s not that serious” applies to this ai model as much as it does to that friend.

If you ever dreamed of writing as well as AI, it’s not that you lack the skill, it’s that your writing lacks this pattern. It’s not enough to say what it’s not , it must be done in every other sentence. It’s not you, it’s AI.

This beautiful essay written by a real human named Thao Thai tells us much about what we need to know about the em dash. Simply put, it’s this thing “ — ” that is longer than a normal dash and is as wide as the letter m. There is also an en dash which is as wide as the letter n. Just about any writing you make Chat GPT do, will have one or many of these dashes..

The dilemma then lies in the fact that this dash that is as wide as an m, is also as beautiful and important as any other tool for a writer to use. To simply call it an AI identifier would be to reduce it to something we have to avoid. In the deliberate act of writing well — something each of us strive for — the dashes offer us a way to be more precise — to take turns and twists without being locked in.

When I read this, when I go through it — I see something, I see it again. When writing something, write it again. Thrice is better but beware, fourth is a mistake you simply can’t make.

Writing is no simple task, no easy hobby, no smooth sensation. I hope you get it, my attempt at showing, my disappointment in writing. As luck would have it, I know this pattern and so, I stop at three.

In all ages of advancements, a foundational question arises — One of intention. Why do you do what you do? Here’s GPT’s answer.

A writer is a writer only because they write. For those of us who actively do what we love, AI solves very little. We write, we draw, , we read — mostly because we choose to. I write for two main reasons: to understand, and to be understood. In the practice of reading me, you read my thoughts and what a shame it would be if you read a machine’s thoughts.

So ask yourself the same question more times than before.Why do you do what you do?

It might be the most important question to ask ourselves as the world steers itself deeper into an artificial life. Let’s ask our artificial friend what it thinks about this:

Now more than ever, it matters that we write as humans. In an age where machines can finish our sentences and mimic our tone, what stands out is not perfection but presence. The slips, the hesitations, the way a thought loops back on itself — these are not errors, but proof that someone lived inside the sentence. When so much of what we read sounds the same, polished to the point of emptiness, the most radical thing we can do is write in a voice no machine can fake: our own.

What GPT is trying to tell us through 81 dramatic words laced with 9 commas for some reason is this: Please stop writing like you lack intelligence — you don’t. Borrowed words are dead words. More importantly, they are not your words.

Here is where I am supposed to end this essay. Here is where I would call back to a point I wrote at the beginning and tell you that my new pen dried up a few paragraphs ago, and maybe the review on amazon was written by AI as well. Here is where I show you that I have clarity about what I write and leave you with something to think about. But here I admit — I’m still not done thinking.

This entire thing could have been done by AI. It’s not, but if it was, would you have known? If you had, would you have cared? I would like to think you would’ve. I would like to think you would hold me accountable for the words I present, question its thought and the source of that thought. I would like to think that as you read me, without a sliver of doubt, you read no one but me.