“Once upon a time in a small village, nestled amidst lush green fields, lived a loving couple named Sarah and John. They both yearned to build a family and fill their humble cottage with the laughter and joy of children…”
The fairytale-inspired lines above were authored by AI – ChatGPT on 24 August 2023, following a prompt to write a short story about the topic of motherhood. The classic opening lines and cliches throughout the rest of the story make it read like something written by a child, or a Disney knockoff.
However, unlike any story you or I could write, ChatGPT can churn out this work in a matter of seconds. Instead, for the average human, the process of writing is often quite different.
The blank page stares back—sometimes for hours. You type five sentences and delete three. Progress is slow. Three cups of coffee later and you’ve only made it halfway down an A4 page.
For many people, the writing experience is a painful one. We have all heard of writer’s block and many of us have experienced it. Others have continuous difficulty in committing any words to the page and, when they do manage it, subject themselves to criticism or cringe at whatever is produced.
The pain of writing is, however, different from other types of pain. It is not bad enough to thwart countless aspiring writers yet does not offer immediate satisfaction like the pain of other achievements, say completing a gruelling workout. As Flannery O’Connor put it in Mystery and Manners, “Writing a novel is a terrible experience, during which the hair often falls out and the teeth decay…”
How well do you really know your competitors?
Access the most comprehensive Company Profiles on the market, powered by GlobalData. Save hours of research. Gain competitive edge.
Thank you!
Your download email will arrive shortly
Not ready to buy yet? Download a free sample
We are confident about the unique quality of our Company Profiles. However, we want you to make the most beneficial decision for your business, so we offer a free sample that you can download by submitting the below form
By GlobalDataMany writers see the masochistic side of their art and have their own explanations for why it is so. Kafka put the pain of writing down to its “solitude”. A century later, Maya Angelou suggested that the pain is from the burning of an “untold” story. But what does science say?
The science of writing
With our growing understanding of neuroscience and the availability of emerging technologies to understand ourselves, the practice of writing is an obvious area for scientists to explore. Enter Martin Lotze from the University of Greifswald. Far in the northeast of Germany, Lotze and his researchers set about discovering what the brain looks like during the writing process.
In 2014, the team compared the brains of experienced and novice writers engaged in their craft using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) technology, a non-invasive technique of measuring and mapping brain activity by detecting small changes in the brain’s blood flow. The writers’ brains were observed as they brainstormed ideas and wrote short stories in three minutes. The study generated many detailed findings on which parts of the brain became active as the writers worked away. There were also some hints as to why writing can be so painful in the first place.
Notably, especially in the case of novice writers, the part of the brain that lit up with activity was the occipital lobe that aids visualization. This showed that the writer was attempting to turn the scenes in their heads into words—the main pain point in their process. The study also found that more experienced writers could begin to automate the process of turning phantom scenes into text. In the more practiced writers, the caudate nucleus part of their brain showed activity, a region of the brain that handles automatic functions or functions that have developed from practice. Therefore, experienced writers naturally developed an aid to bypass some of the pain of writing.
However, the overall hive of activity recorded in the brain throughout the writing process is unavoidable and represents a potential source of the pain a writer experiences.
Despite this early study, we are still a long way from understanding what happens in the brain during the writing process. Freud’s statement in 1908 that the creative writer is a “strange being” whose “impression” on us and “material” come from unknown places is still partly true today. And the fogginess of our understanding of how the brain works during writing may be a further contributor to the pain of the process. There are still no shortcuts. Outside of neuroscience, the pain of the writer may be down to the psychology of the experience, the personality of writers, their routines, the motivation required, and so on. For some, the pain is in choosing an idea to transform into a story, for others it is an inability to articulate these ideas, or a difficulty in editing their work, sometimes it is a combination of all these stages.
AI and the writing process
So, if science and technology can start to explain the pain of writing, can it take it away? Without overthinking the statement, it seems fair to say that ChatGPT feels no pain in composing stories. It could produce story after story for every minute of the day.
However, the current narrative around AI in writing is one of worry. This is an expected reaction to an emerging technology that has the potential to take the jobs of humans, but as the ChatGPT extract at the start of this article revealed, it is still far from perfect. Despite recent AI hype, artificial general intelligence (AGI), or the ability of machines to do anything that a human can and possess consciousness, is still decades away. Writing produced by AI is not able to engage and entertain us yet, but the fear of it as a threat to writers is here to stay. Will AI’s abilities replace writers? Will it strip the creativity of humans?
In recent strikes, alongside demands for better working conditions and streaming residuals, the Writers Guild of America stressed the need to regulate AI. And far from banning AI, this could take the form of regulation that promotes AI’s use in a supporting capacity. Perhaps AI tools could take away some of the pain of writing. They could be used by writers to brainstorm ideas, edit human-produced works, and provide writers with alternative suggestions and variations while bypassing the labour of hundreds of revisions. Ultimately, it is still unclear whether AI will be championed by writers, like similar tools available through word processing software, or whether they will be protested against. However, it does seem possible that AI could elevate writers instead of replacing them, leaving behind just enough of the pain and glory for the human writers themselves.
