If AI can write, what is unwriting for?
Where writing is alive, and where it isn’t.
AI generates vast quantities of text instantaneously, drawing from patterns in its training data. You generate thoughts from accumulated experiences and memories, select some, commit them to the page.
Both pull from vast internal reservoirs, both select what surfaces, both produce text through pattern recognition. We might just as well be an LLM, just in human form. Or perhaps more accurately, an SLM (Small Language Model). Though given the massive content dwelling in our subconsciousness, we’d remain an LLM after all.
If the processes mirror each other, let’s put them to the test.
Let AI write your material entirely (if you aren’t already). Keep it deliberately open and vague. Tell the system: I’m thinking about idea A. Gather some ideas around it and put them together in a nicely polished post.
Then comes the AI slop.
Many accept it. Copy-paste and continue.
A way to avoid writing, which can be time-consuming and boring.
Yet we type constantly. In fragments, dispersed across platforms.
Reading constitutes writing when recognition matters more than mere production. Recognition in the form if identifying ideas through attraction and repulsion. Speaking is another form of writing, simply not transcribed and therefore overlooked.
When we see we’re already writing, probably far more than we realize, just in different shapes, why shortcut the unfolding when it comes to actual composition?
We choose to live fully, intentionally, immerse into experience.
Writing deserves the same. The most emerges when you give everything. AI typically prevents this immersion.
It keeps us surface-level. We avoid going through the material. We leave our mental capacity dormant, our bodies uninvolved.
We’ve got AI-centered writing and embodied writing. Embodied writing can still perfectly incorporate plenty of AI assistance. As long as you still give everything of yourself, which is the authenticity.
Sure, authenticity can be faked. AI humanizers, techniques to sound genuine. To me, authenticity proves insufficient as an objective.
Speed, effortlessness, other longed-for qualities. These miss the point too.
Unwriting requires more effort than writing. Actually all of our effort. It has to absorb us entirely, so there’s no writer interfering any longer. Paradoxically, this makes it effortless. Through complete effort, you become fully occupied, leaving no space to worry about the effort itself. The effort takes over, becoming effortless.
Why does unwriting come with full effortless effort?
Because we give it all. Wholesome work makes you forget everything else. The flow state some of us talk about, except unchanging, always present. We must give everything because taking away (the un in unwriting) proves trickier than adding more volume.
Venting countless ideas requires little thought. Getting to the essence demands consideration, thoughtfulness. Unwriting means removing, recognizing what holds, undoing what’s been done. When we give everything, unwriting qualities such as flow and authenticity invite themselves.
