My only writing advice is please, please try to sound like a human being

I love this piece, “Why Does A.I. Write Like… That?” which really captures a “novel form of paranoia” taking hold of many of us:

This year, I read an article in which a writer complained about A.I. tools cheapening the craft. But I could barely pay attention, because I kept encountering sentences that felt as if they’d been written by A.I. It’s becoming an increasingly wretched life. You can experience it too.

It’s a funny piece, and very helpful if you are curious what makes a piece of writing sound like a chatbot these days (whether or not it is).

But at one point in the piece, Kriss smartly points out that these “bland and predictable rhetorical move[s]” are also kind of… normal, even human?

Like: isn’t this what people mostly write and say and do: bland and predictable shit?

Even though I am a documentary film director for a living (not a professional writer), writing is a huge part of my job. Some examples from this week, not because they’re exciting, but because they are typical:

1. I am writing a 15 page treatment for a doc I have in development;

2. I am writing some initial outreach to someone I really want to make a documentary about in the new year;

3. I wrote a director’s statement for another doc I’ve been “attached” to.1

4. I did a bunch of press for Happy and You Know It — this isn’t writing per se, but I felt the writer inside of me working in real time to pitch the film to audiences;

5. Needless to say, I wrote 9,000,000,000,000,000 emails, but we don’t need to dwell on that.

Every single one of these writing tasks requires me to be at least as good as and ideally better than A.I. Even more: I need to try really hard to not sound like a chatbot. I need there to be no doubt in the mind of the reader that the person who wrote this actually wrote this. Not for every single thing I write ever, but for a pitch or a funding proposal or important outreach? It’s like the main thing, I think, at this point…

I asked a chatbot to summarize my article for you…

There’s a book I adore by Brian Christian called The Most Human Human: What Talking with Computers Teaches Us About What It Means to Be Alive. Christian’s basic premise is that the essence of what makes us human can be found when we discover what A.I. struggles most with — spontaneity, unpredictability, situated knowledge, personal vulnerability. Yes, by now this is a familiar refrain, but he wrote this book more than 15 years ago. The more important point he makes, IMO, is how much of our lives we exalted human beings execute as automatically as machines:

Computers can only do one thing: math. Fortunately for them, a shockingly high percentage of life can be translated into math . . . What a familiarity with the construction of Turing test bots had begun to show me was that we fail – again and again – to actually be human with other humans.

(The section on pickup artists is revelatory.)

One thing I realized when I started experimenting with ChatGPT was that generating a perfectly fine director’s statement, synopsis, outreach email —was trivial. I could, with very little effort, easily meet the normal standards I see in my field. I could even ask it to write “in the voice of Penny Lane” and it like, put in some pretty good jokes. Sad, but true. I liked some of the jokes.

What this told me, and what I started to immediately implement in all my writing tasks, was that I’d better get better at sounding like a human being.

Now, this is harder than it sounds, and this is a familiar insight. I have had it many times before. I can trace it back to experiences on grant panels and hiring committees, reviewing hundreds of applications. Long before we had little AI overlords in our pockets doing Chatbot Omnispeak, we were already very good at doing it to ourselves.

Try reading 100 cover letters for the same academic job. Trust me: any little spark of personality that manages to make it through feels like a freaking miracle. Ditto for grant applications; it is absolutely deadening to read the same jargon, the same fashionable buzzwords, the same boring safe passive-voice artist statements (“My work deals in the intersection of…”), the same same sameness of it all… it is deadening.

(Please take a moment to pity anyone serving on a grant committee in this godforsaken era. My advice to those organizations is cut the word count for a grant application WAY DOWN. Those long applications are just begging to be written by a chatbot, which loves nothing more than to generate good-looking blather endlessly. We are going to need to rethink the grant application immediately!)

My only writing advice is please, please try to sound like a human being. It’s more important than ever. It’s a competitive world out there, with an endless torrent of noise (slop) you’ve got to try to cut through. And maybe it’s important just to keep our souls intact.

I know it is hard. I often struggle with sounding like a human being in writing. (I blame academia, but I’m just kidding because it’s hard for everyone.) Just getting it in the sound of my spoken voice is usually a good first step. Like, I’ll just walk around the house talking to myself until I get it.

But if you’re stuck, you could ask a friend to listen to your idea. Ask them to ask questions like, “but why?” or “I don’t follow that part, can you say that again?” and most importantly (in my line of work) “so what exactly is on the screen?” Record the conversation and look at the transcription. How you speak is going to be closer to human-sounding than writing. Writing adds another layer of abstraction.

It is so hard! I have been painstakingly hand-writing and hand-drawing an 8-page letter this week, instead of just doing the normal, sane thing which would be to write an email (and maybe let ChatGPT write it for me). If it doesn’t work, at least they’ll get something nice in the mail?

A detail from my “About Me” page. ChatGPT could never! Although I do run the risk of seeming totally deranged, so IDK. This reminds me of when I was in college and I did internship applications for the very first time. Despite knowing nothing about how to apply for a job that was not a fast food restaurant, I sought no advice, and I wrote all the cover letters in like different color markers with little drawings?? I did not get any of those jobs. A humiliating memory… but maybe I was just ahead of my time!