"I write to find out what I think."
Or, what AI can't do
Daniel Boorstin is not exactly a household name. In the 1950s and ‘60s, he was a political historian, author, and professor at the University of Chicago. He wore big glasses and bow ties, and looked like a classic nerdy librarian. And, in fact, in 1975 President Gerald Ford appointed Boorstin as Librarian of the United States Congress – in other words, he ran the Library of Congress.
Early in my career as a journalist, I somehow, randomly, ran across a quote attributed to him. Now, I had never heard of Boorstin and didn’t know anything about him. This was the mid-1980s. There was no internet, no Google. Nobody would’ve posted a Boorstin quote on Instagram. I have no idea how I would’ve run into anything about him.
But when I saw the quote, it spoke to my soul as a young and determined writer. In a few words it described what I loved about writing:
“I write to find out what I think.”
I had the quote printed on a small strip of paper. (Again…how? I didn’t have a computer or printer. Maybe it was one of those old-school hand-held label makers.) For years, I kept that quote taped to my desk wherever I worked.
Now that Google exists, I’ve been able to find out that versions of the quote have also been attributed to writers such as William Faulkner, Joan Didion and even Shirley MacLaine. Actually, if you look on the internet, the quote mostly gets attached to Stephen King, who likely would’ve said it after Boorstin.
So it seems Boorstin riffed on a truth about writing that’s floated in the ether for a long time. The act of writing brings thinking to the forefront and forces you to organize what’s in your head. By organizing it, you make sense of it, and make connections, and sometimes think of something no one else has before.
Today, I find that the quote takes on a fresh meaning in the age of artificial intelligence. In a few words, it describes something uniquely human.
AI can’t write to find out what it thinks.
It can only write based on what others have already thought. AI takes facts and intelligently arranges them in writing based on how others have written. But it can’t take those facts and draw conclusions that nobody ever thought of before. Or write about those facts in an entirely original way.
AI also can’t forge something beyond the edges of what anyone has considered before.
For instance, AI will probably eventually be able to write a Broadway musical that’s much like a classic Andrew Lloyd Webber musical. (Prompt: Write a musical about the 1969 New York Mets in the style of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s “Cats.” I’d go see that! But it won’t break new ground.)
Yet AI can’t be like Lin-Manuel Miranda shaking up Broadway by creating “Hamilton” – a play based on the life of Alexander Hamilton as told through hip-hop music and performed by a multi-racial cast. It can’t conceive, as Miranda did, of something that has no precedent. For now anyway, that takes a human mind.
So, for everyone freaking out about AI, this is our superpower. What’s in our brains are more creative thoughts than AI can generate. But for those thoughts to be valuable, you have to know what they are and have a way to present them to others. That’s where writing comes into play.
Whatever you do for work, it’s important to sit down and write. Find out what’s inside. Take yourself on a journey through what you uniquely know and how you connect ideas and concepts. Creative value will emerge.
It’s an act of discovery that sets us apart from AI.
(By the way, I’m finding out what I think about this by writing about it. So meta.)