On AI-assisted writing

I’m a huge fan of Venkatesh Rao’s writing and I reread this essay on his experience with AI-assisted writing. Now that pretty much everybody has access some basic large language models (LLMs) through the free plans of ChatGPT or the better Chinese models like DeepSeek and Qwen, is there a need to go through the manual toil of writing anymore?

AI-assisted writing allows you to have your cake and eat it too. The pleasure of the creative process, and the pleasure of reading. That’s in fact a test of good slop — do you feel like reading it?

My understanding of what’s going on here is in my other AI-assisted-essay-about-AI from last week, about LLMs being similar to index funds for language. This essay could be considered my first modest AI-assisted viral hit. A lot of people appreciated it for the actual ideas in it, not just the novelty element of it being AI-coauthored. If I’d hidden the AI-assistance aspect, I suspect people would have given me more credit for it.

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As I said, I’m currently segregating my unassisted posts from my AI-assisted posts, and I intend to keep this up for a while. But it’s already clear to me that the distinction is already meaningless and is going to vanish sooner rather than later.

We’re currently in the AI-era equivalent of what used to be called digital dualism, when we still made the distinction between online and offline. The assisted vs. unassisted distinction is helpful for now, but it’s already clear that the boundary is entirely artificial and destined to disappear. Good riddance.

I’m curious about the repucrussions if we lose our ability to write unasisted. What do we lose in the process? I don’t have a good answer yet.

I asked Claude what happened when we went from an oral to written culture:

The transition from oral to written culture represents one of the most profound shifts in human communication, fundamentally altering not just how we store information, but how we think, argue, and organize society itself.

The Nature of Oral Communication

Oral cultures developed sophisticated techniques for preserving and transmitting knowledge without writing. Walter Ong’s seminal work “Orality and Literacy” demonstrates how oral communication is inherently contextual, participatory, and formulaic. Speakers relied heavily on rhythmic patterns, repetition, and mnemonic devices—think of the formulaic epithets in Homer’s epics (“rosy-fingered dawn,” “wine-dark sea”). Information existed only in performance and memory, making it necessarily conservative since innovation risked losing established knowledge.

Oral cultures also fostered what Ong calls “additive” rather than “subordinative” thinking—ideas connected through “and then” rather than complex logical hierarchies. Communication was immediate, personal, and embedded in face-to-face relationships where tone, gesture, and shared context carried enormous meaning.

Writing’s Cognitive Revolution

The introduction of alphabetic writing around 750 BCE in Greece created what Eric Havelock termed a “literate revolution.” Writing externalized memory, freeing mental capacity for abstract analysis rather than mere storage. This enabled the development of formal logic, systematic philosophy, and complex legal codes that would have been impossible to maintain orally.

Jack Goody’s research on “The Logic of Writing” shows how writing systems created new forms of knowledge organization—lists, tables, and categorical thinking. The visual arrangement of text on a page allowed for new analytical techniques: readers could compare passages, trace arguments across time, and develop increasingly sophisticated forms of reasoning.

Writing also democratized knowledge in unexpected ways. While initially controlled by scribal elites, literacy gradually spread, allowing individuals to engage with ideas independent of immediate social hierarchies and oral performance traditions.

The Printing Revolution’s Amplification

Elizabeth Eisenstein’s “The Printing Press as an Agent of Change” argues that printing didn’t simply reproduce manuscripts more efficiently—it transformed the entire information ecosystem. Print standardized texts, eliminating the copying errors that plagued manuscripts and creating, for the first time, truly identical copies of works that could be studied and referenced across vast distances.

This standardization had cascading effects: it enabled the scientific revolution by allowing researchers to build systematically on previous work, fostered the development of national languages by privileging certain dialects, and created new forms of authority based on textual rather than personal relationships. Benedict Anderson’s “Imagined Communities” shows how print capitalism enabled people to conceive of themselves as part of larger national communities through shared reading experiences.

Resistance and Persistence of Oral Elements

The transition wasn’t simply linear replacement. Ruth Finnegan’s ethnographic work reveals how oral and written traditions often coexisted, with written texts serving as prompts for oral performance rather than replacing it entirely. Even today, we see oral residues in our “literate” culture—consider how academic lectures, political speeches, and storytelling maintain oral rhetorical strategies.

Medieval Europe, for instance, maintained strong oral legal traditions even after writing became common, with many legal proceedings requiring oral testimony and communal witness rather than documentary evidence.

Cognitive and Social Implications

The shift reshaped human consciousness itself. Writing enabled what David Olson calls “autonomous text”—meaning that could exist independent of its original context and speaker. This created new possibilities for criticism, analysis, and abstract thought, but also what some scholars see as losses: the communal, participatory nature of knowledge in oral cultures gave way to more individualized, privatized forms of learning.

Marshall McLuhan’s media ecology approach suggests that these technologies didn’t just carry messages—they reshaped the “sensory ratios” of human experience, privileging visual over auditory processing and linear over circular thinking patterns.

Contemporary Relevance

Interestingly, digital media has created what Ong called “secondary orality”—electronic communication that combines features of both oral and literate culture. Social media, podcasts, and video calls restore some immediacy and participation while maintaining writing’s capacity for storage and transmission across time and space.

This historical perspective illuminates current debates about how digital technologies are reshaping human communication, suggesting that major media transitions always involve both gains and losses, and that older forms rarely disappear completely but instead find new niches and hybrid expressions.

The scholarly consensus suggests that rather than simple technological determinism, these transitions involved complex interactions between new communicative possibilities and existing social, political, and cognitive structures—a perspective crucial for understanding our current digital transformation.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​