AI is out now, and there’s no way to unrelease that proverbial genie. Writer’s reactions to AI range from denial to an Osho-like orgasmic fervour.

Both are over-reactions.

AI cannot be the writer, but it can help the writer. If you know what you’re trying to say, AI can help you craft it – especially for non-fiction. Like this email – yes we used AI for a Neanderthal first draft. Then we rewrote almost all of it. AI was a bouncing board that helped us figure out what we wanted to say.

But if you let AI write, you get a formulaic rehash in Americanese that sounds like a machine wrote it. AI can, at best, be the editor. You’re always the writer.

Ergo, the key question: Which parts of writing benefit from AI, and which stay human?

AI can do a lot of basic hygiene stuff. It can tighten and streamline sentences ( it may improve clarity, but not beauty), rewrite emails, cut repetition, enforce brevity for overwriters, and polish and perk up slack prose. If you’re not looking for originality but for smart sounding rewriting, it’ll do (ergo, all the assembly-line blogposts suffering from clonespeak.)

But ask it for, say, an original metaphor, and you’ll likely get trash. A metaphor describing todays digital generation like “I dont think that stillness, that quality of attention, is even possible in digital-age humans, who suckle on mobile phones from the day they are born.” needs a human who connects dots in a unique way in their head. This example is from Page 328 of Arundhathi Roy’s “Mother Mary comes to me”.

But at the structural level, does AI help improve flow, probe, reorganize like a master editor – think Tay Hohoff or Ravi Singh? Nah. AI has no aesthetic. Of course, with smart prompting, you can tell it which aesthetic to imitate. But when people have tried to write fiction, it comes off as smart but familiar sounding. Clever language that leaves you wondering exactly what it’s saying. Like this much touted piece that Sam Altman mentioned HERE.
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AI is useful for research too: AI surfaces quick directions for topics like science or history. It can even make decent thematic suggestions for fiction, especially genre fiction. Devdutt Pattanaik, who teaches for us, told us how he uses AI extensively as a tool for research.
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When he was at the retreat last October he recorded and transcribed all his own sessions – so AI was his virtual assistant, not his co-writer. It helped him do more with what he already knew.

But he doesn’t use AI to actually write. That he keeps for himself.

In his three city AI workshop tour, Chetan (who leads this himalayan workshop) called AI an imbalanced brain, with a overdeveloped left half, and a puny right too small for humanness.