The Sandia National Laboratory, New Mexico via Shutterstock. Over the weekend, writers and journalists were left reeling after Megan McArdle, long-time columnist at The Washington Post, gushed about the benefits of using AI to optimize her writing. “Think of your chatbot as a combination of an intern, a first-pass editor, and fact-checker,” she advised in a series of tweets that possessed the genteel tone of a telemarketer peddling a fraudulent scheme. While McArdle was emphatic about not using the technology to generate ideas, she praised its ability to take care of the “grunt work,” which she considers secondary to writing and thinking. If you’re a media professional who’s been forced to relinquish the idea of earning a living from the work you love to hate, it’s hard not to feel taunted by this casual admission of corner-cutting from a successful and salaried writer at a legacy publication. Over the past 25 years, the industry has become a shell of itself as plummeting newspaper circulations, declining ad revenue, discontinued titles, and the volatility of social media platforms (courtesy of erratic billionaires) have placed the future of media and journalism into existential free fall. As a result, talented writers, reporters, and journalists have been driven out of the field, with only a handful managing to secure the dwindling number of freelance gigs available for the time being, or eking out a few bucks through a personal newsletter on the oversaturated landscape that is Substack. Now, the advent of AI has accelerated the pace of this ongoing apocalypse. It’s one thing to scramble for a sliver of jobs on a block of empty storefronts. It’s another thing to watch soulless techlords seize the entire neighborhood, only to repopulate it with incompetent, homicidal robots that threaten its very existence. For all we know, McArdle’s endorsement of AI could be a shameless plug encouraged in a company-wide memo by the ghoulish Jeff Bezos, who seems hellbent on driving the publication that leaked Watergate into extinction. Paid ad or not, it still raises the question of why a writer with the luxury of institutional backing, staff support, and guaranteed income would pawn off the most vital parts of their job to a robot. Perhaps the issue lies with how McArdle defines the “main” and “ancillary” parts of writing and thinking. In her catalogue of AI cheat codes, she lists research, transcription, polemics, revision, formulation of interview questions, and fact-checking among the tasks she delegates to the software that she oddly characterizes as a long-suffering but trusty personal assistant—a description that would explain why these forms of labor have traditionally been poorly compensated throughout the history of journalism. Despite surrendering a large chunk of her job to AI, McArdle, astonishingly enough, still views herself as the sole author of her work. Even when she confesses to “experimenting” with asking her chatbot to produce a Megan McArdle-esque piece, which she tosses aside for failing to capture her voice and style, she doesn’t regard this as a compromise of the integrity and veracity of a writer. But for anyone who’s ever produced a piece of writing, the job of research, transcription, fact-checking, and revision isn’t merely a task. Nor is it ancillary. In fact, these forms of labor are often the most integral components of writing, providing the infrastructure that enables enhancement, deviation, questioning, revision, and sometimes a total overhaul of the original premise of a piece. Admittedly, this process is tedious. There’s nothing more humbling, if not humiliating, than coming to terms with the limitations of your knowledge, mistakes in your research, or the prospect of having to start a draft from scratch. It is a struggle. Sometimes a long one. Which is why the temptation to deputize these responsibilities to a robot can seem like the optimal thing to do. Yet to avoid this labor is to give up on the act of writing and thinking as a whole. It is to treat optimization as the goal of a profession that embraces people who can produce beauty, insight, and clarity despite being fairly inept in other parts of their lives. It took a while for me to accept that these were the terms for most writers. I’ve never been especially prolific or efficient in my career. Even at the height of my most productive years, I’d still ask for deadline extensions, submit a piece minutes before an agreed time, or avoid the texts and emails of editors patiently requesting a status update on a piece. This led to a deep sense of shame and loathing over how long it took me to cobble together enough words to form a semi-coherent draft. While I’ve occasionally attempted to spin my chronic defiance of deadlines into a punchline to charm my editors out of their frustration towards me, I still wish I could recover the pace at which I filed a copy a decade ago (hence this newsletter arriving on a Tuesday). I still hold out hope that I won’t go down 100 different rabbit holes while doing research, or that I’ll be able to quote errorlessly from the backlog of books sitting in my head. I’m fully committed to the delusion that I’ll one day outgrow my habit of spending hours revising a sentence or paragraph, or that I’ll graduate out of the belief that there is always a better word or turn of phrase lurking out there. But maybe a more generative approach might be to accept these conditions of struggle as part of the job. A few years ago, I dated a scientist who was baffled by my constant complaints about the detours, pivots, and gridlocks that I encountered while working on a piece. “But isn’t that just part of the process?” he asked, sincerely. “It sounds like you’re performing different experiments that ultimately lead you to a hypothesis.” I remain hesitant to embrace this generous analogy given that my profession, though invaluable in so many ways, is hardly curing terminal diseases. Still, it has sharpened my understanding of the value of grunt work—the drawn-out, unglamorous, painstaking, repetitive, and often stagnating labor that underpins all forms of writing and thinking. It’s precisely this “inefficiency and friction,” as New York magazine writer Sam Adler-Bell recently described in an interview, that makes moments of clarity like an arresting lede, a seamless transition into a new paragraph, a highly reliable source, or a dynamite turn of phrase, feel life-affirming. As this cartel of misanthropic AI CEOs seeks to render human capital obsolete, it feels ever more urgent to reject their push to denigrate aspects of our labor that are slow, meticulous, painstaking, and difficult. After all, shifting in and out of these modes has enabled our survival as a species. And for writers seduced by the lure of a consistently productive chatbot, I leave you with this wry but heartfelt description of our profession by the writer Dorothy Parker: “I hate writing, [but] I love having written.” – Khanya Mtshali, staff writer |
