Writing in the Age of Generative AI

His favorite part of comedy writing, he said, “is figuring out the puzzle pieces of a joke and getting the self-regard from having accomplished a difficult thing. Why would I want AI to take that away from me?”

Ronny Cheng at 2026 Harvard Commencement

I am at a workshop on 'Writing in the Age of Generative AI' with literary and copyright scholars.¹

I was expecting to be in my echo chamber but strikingly find I am not.

There is very smart analysis and theorisation, but so sense of resistance, not feeling this is a change for the worse and we have a duty, as intellectuals, to try to all least mitigate and at best stop its worst effects. #ResistAI

What was most striking was the #Literary scholars who were inclined to treat #LLM outputs as just another text, created in specific and novel ways, which could be analysed alongside other cultural productions.

They had moved so far - theoretically - from the idea of literature as exclusively the production of specially gifted people and expressive of their unique, if historically situated, genius, that LLM output was just another object of analysis and interpretation.

One of the lawyers noted that this radical rejection of 'bourgeois' conceptions of art was actually aligning #LiteraryTheory with the interests of #BigTech #AIFutures.

And of course the critique of #Copyright as essentially a tool for turning creative production into bourgeois #Capitalism is quite credible.

But we can question copyright and resist AI at the same time! Because they have the same fault: the capture of labour value by capital.

Today we are discussing ways forward.

30 years ago (!) I used to teach a philosophy course on #Aesthetics and we always covered the significance of authorial intention - usually as a debate between Beardsley and Barthes, which was an oversimplification but had the virtue of ahistorical analytic approaches that it treated the matter as an open question.

Of course we can't go back in time. We cannot simply adopt romantic theories of genius as if we were in the 18th century. But literary theory already recognises the consistency of thinking history is irreversible with thinking it is not teleological. 'Progress' is ambiguous. We can progress through history without believing in historical progress.

In which case, we can find versions of old doctrines which are historically appropriate for our time.

Perhaps then the proper response to the problem of 'Writing in the Age of GenAI' is to seek a new theory of the importance of authorial intention.

A theory that learns from what has gone before, but also responds to the absurdity of killing the author in a time when machines can create indistinguishable texts.

In such a time as ours, we need to valorise authors, people who care about the process and enjoy the effort.

As Hemingway once quipped²: writing is easy, you just sit down at the typewriter and open a vein.