Is AI really ‘writing’? From a priestess to philosophers, ancient authors would have said ‘no’

I teach , but my college students and I often overlook a surprisingly complicated question: What is writing?

And can artificial intelligence really do it?

Many people think of “writing” as putting words on a page. However, even from very early on, writers have seen their craft as something more. From Enheduanna, , to Plato and Aristotle, writing has been portrayed and defined in ways that suggest AI may not be “writing” at all.

If not, what should we call AI text? ChatGPT and I have an idea.

Praising and pleading

Enheduanna, who lived around 2,300 B.C.E., was a powerful princess, priestess and poet of the Akkadian Empire, in what is now Iraq. She has been celebrated as , though the authorship of her poems and hymns is debated.

, “,” reveals a sense of what writing is and does – portraying it as a living medium that expresses experience and shapes the future.

First, praises , who was associated with fertility and war, among other powers. “My Lady, you are the guardian / Of all greatness,” Enheduanna says, in a translation by .

That praise may be strategic. It is followed by Enheduanna’s plea to overthrow Lugal-Ane, a rebel king who she describes exiling her and taking her post at the temple of Ur. “Now I have been cast out / To the place of lepers,” she writes, describing her suffering. “Day comes, / And the brightness / Is hidden around me.”

Grieving, Enheduanna writes a new destiny. In , the priestess envisions Inanna coming to her aid and “tear[ing] off this fate, Lugale-Ane.” And her pleading seems to be successful: The end of the poem depicts Enheduanna restored to her post.

In Enheduanna’s poetry, writing does not simply communicate information. It interacts with the present and changes the future. The priestess’s pleas please the goddess, move her heart, and she restore Enheduanna to her post – though historians have little evidence of whether an exile and return really happened.

But her poetry did have , helping to create in the world’s first empire. For example, her writing merged the Sumerian goddess Inanna , describing a single “.”

AI writing can be used to try to create change, such as by . But it lacks the human emotions that make experiences like praise, gratitude and suffering possible – the emotions and motivations that make writing a living medium with real-world effects.

Transforming over informing

Two thousand years after Enheduanna, Plato and his student Aristotle offered another influential view of writing – one that complements hers.

In the “Phaedrus,” which discusses , Plato famously defines writing as a . Speech’s job is to represent thoughts; thoughts, in turn, represent knowledge and truth. Similarly, , “Spoken words are the symbols of mental experience and written words are the symbols of spoken words.”

Even that definition marks a sharp contrast with AI, which . Its output proceeds from data aggregation and text generation.

To understand what writing is, we also need to look at what it does. Although Plato elevates speech over writing, he suggests in “Phaedrus” that good writing . Similar to Enheduanna, he employs writing as a tool for change, both inside and outside the text.

In Plato’s dialogues, characters often their opinions. And today, almost 2,500 years after his death, the philosopher’s real-world impact is clear. For instance, universities and colleges today are collectively called the “Academy” because , the . English scholar Alfred North Whitehead famously wrote that all Western philosophy is “a series of .”

Aristotle’s voluminous works, too, show writing’s purpose transcends communication. In “,” for instance, he details ways to make writing persuasive. Aristotle defines rhetoric as a way of “moving souls,” not just exchanging knowledge.

For both of the Greek philosophers, then, writing is more about transformation than information.

Today, however, may make writing less dynamic and less moving. Use of AI risks a , according to a study led by . In other words, much AI writing today lacks distinct voices, – which could , too.

‘Generwriting’

Overall, these three ancient authors agree that writing emerges from thoughts and experiences – a process that strives to create change. Enheduanna, Plato and Aristotle also agree that writing’s essence transcends and information transmission common to AI output today.

Although AI can generate , its writing may not “move souls” the way human writing does. Several studies show a “” or an “,” meaning that people prefer human writing even when AI writing is stylistically similar. People want to read what other people write, not what an algorithm pumps out.

Perhaps we need a different word for AI’s output. Common terms today include “generative content” and “synthetic text,” but I wondered if I could land on something simpler – and involve AI itself. After prompting and tweaking ChatGPT over and over, I settled on one word: “generwrite.”

Though AI is here to stay, new words may help distinguish types of text. And as Enheduanna, Plato and Aristotle remind us, there are elements of writing that may always be unique to embodied, thinking beings striving to move souls.