The Voiceless

I love to write. It has always been a passion for me. It serves to flush my mind and frame approaches and thoughts that were previously dormant. I have fancied myself a good writer. Though now with AI I'm questioning if co-creation is merging, descending really, into abdication. Where do we end and the AI begin?

Oliver Wendell Holmes' classic, The Voiceless, is a lament for the voiceless among us. "Alas for those that never sing, but die with all their music in them," the first stanza concludes. It's a beautiful poem that speaks to me deeply. I have long enjoyed thinking through the voiceless in society, the ones those of us with power can empower.

The emergence of AI brings polish. There are many great things about it, and yet with that polish comes the strong temptation to abdication. I can't hope to write as well as Claude can. And yet clear, functionally perfect writing is the output, not the process.

Writing flushes our subconscious and aligns neural pathways. It liberates those dormant feelings, those nudges, that are too underdeveloped to enter our conscious mind. It gives them voice.

But the process of writing is what does that. The mistakes, the errors, the grammatical and linguistic nuances that our mind makes as we create. AI skips that process. It takes a generic quick chat and converts it into a polished finished piece. That isn't productivity, that is abdication. And it is a pernicious kind of abdication: one that makes us dumber over time. The cycle is vicious and builds. The more we lean on AI for writing, the more we must lean on AI for thinking.

Not all of this is bad. The output AI creates is a joy to read, at least when it is reflecting back a completed work that we like to think we could produce.

I like to think I can tell AI writing from authentic writing. "What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly," Thomas Paine said of liberty. It rings true in a smaller context here, and yet is it that small? Our liberty lies in the vise grip of AI. And it is getting tighter.

A quick note on perfection, though. The perfection AI produces is of a particular type. It is normalized perfection. It leaves no room for how language and innovation conspire to produce something new, something great.

Hopkins is another famous poet. His poems are widely read and inspire millions, including me. His dark sonnets met me in a dark season and gave me life. They told me I was not alone and, as poetry often does, they gave verse and rhyme to my emotions. They gave me voice and increased my agency.

Hopkins' writing does not follow standard meter. It is quixotic and a tad chaotic. The rhymes, and in some cases the halted rhymes, add a layer to the poetry. Take the opening to his famous poem, The Windhover: "I caught this morning morning's minion, king-dom of daylight's dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding." Traditional poets of the day chided him for the chaos of his verse. It didn't follow the norm. And yet it speaks to us.

The consequences of abdication are playing out in real time right now. Volumes of blogs, LinkedIn content, books, and more are flooding the internet. Each represents a small piece of abdicated thought. And yet some of it isn't fatal. Automating the production of a brochure under the tight guidance of parameters feels innocuous enough. Though I wonder how much better the team would interact with a potential client if they had struggled with the prose to make sure it was accurate and effective.

I feel it in my own practice as well. The essays and letters I once enjoyed writing feel like a fruitless effort because I know there's a cheat code I can enter to get perfection. We all want perfection in our work. It's innate within us. It drives us to pursue it through deliberate practice. But if a cheat code exists, why not take it?

The lure is powerful. The siren song irresistible. And the consequence? We become the voiceless in Holmes' poem. We lose our agency one letter at a time. Our liberty feels secure until one day we cannot form sentences. Ironically, those authentic sentences, fashioned by real humans, are what AI uses to produce that perfection.

AI produces perfection in our current linguistic norms. It provides a false perfection that locks us all into a prison across time. The prison excludes Hopkins and Holmes. And slowly but surely it excludes each of us, as the line between AI and human draws near. Each attempt at acceleration that devolves into abdication brings us a little closer to mediocrity, and to the lamented in Holmes' poem.