Notes and discussion for Jonathan Warner's More Than Words: How to Think About Writing in the Age of AI

by Tom Johnson on Apr 15, 2025
categories: ai • writing

• Questions for discussion
• Links
• Warner’s main arguments
• My reactions to Warner’s book
• Quotations from the book

This post has notes and questions for discussion for More Than Words: How to Think About Writing in the Age of AI, by Jonathan Warner, published in February 2025. This book, which explores what we lose when we outsource writing to AI, is the first book in my AI Book Club.

Questions for discussion

• What types of content are worth writing with AI and not writing with AI?
• Does AI dehumanize the writing experience, removing writing as a tool for thinking and eliminating the emotional experience of wrestling with a topic?
• What value does technical documentation have in Warner’s view?
• Why doesn’t Warner explore the possibility of using AI to augment our writing?
• What do we lose when we use AI to write documentation?
• Are we still doing analytical, judgment-oriented, editorial/thinking tasks when directing AI with writing tasks and shaping outputs?
• Are there certain creative tasks related to documentation that we should keep human-produced?
• Why did I start an AI book club with a book that’s decidedly against using AI tools to write?

Links

• My review: Book review of Jonathan Warner’s book More Than Words: How to think about writing in the age of AI
• Warner’s substack blog: The Biblioracle Recommends
  • Freedom’s just another word
  • Horrors and Hopes

Warner’s main arguments

• By “writing,” the author mainly focuses on expressive writing. But Warner is pretty soured on almost all types of AI-generated content. In his mind, any writing that’s worth doing is writing that involves thinking and feeling. Examples: essays, articles, books, etc. Not really targeting technical documentation in this book.
• Writing is a tool for thinking. If you outsource writing to AI, you’re outsourcing your thinking to AI. It’s a voluntary deskilling.
• Writing is a way to engage emotionally with a subject. You reflect on how you feel towards subjects and what you think about them. If you offload this to AI, you’re removing the emotional component of writing. You’re withdrawing some of what makes you human.
• What about the calculator analogy as support for AI? Warner says calculators empower students to do more advanced math. What does ChatGPT allow students to do? Are they doing more advanced writing? No, ChatGPT is doing the writing.
• Outsourcing writing to AI creates less intellectual momentum, as you no longer prompt your subconscious to continue working through problems (with the subconscious leading to random eureka moments in the shower, etc.).
• Writers are already paid little to nothing. Now the written word will be devalued even more. Will writing survive?
• Students are turning to ChatGPT to write essays because composition instruction in high schools and colleges have been stripped down to algorithmic rubrics that don’t treat writing as exploration and a tool for thinking (e.g., a thesis must appear at the end of an intro; the intro should begin with an interesting fact or question, etc.). Students hate the formulaic essay structure and expectations, so of course they’ll take an out (using AI) when presented with a workaround.
• Reading is similar to writing in that it involves thinking and feeling. Reducing everything to bullet points and summaries eliminates our engagement with texts. AI tools can’t engage with a text, and you can’t outsource that engagement to AI. If you’re only dealing with high-level summaries and AI-rendered versions of text, you aren’t engaging with those texts.
• ChatGPT isn’t genuinely solving any problems and is only making things worse. What problem does ChatGPT actually solve?
• AI-generated content lacks the human substance of writing. It doesn’t say anything notable, doesn’t show a mind thinking, and lacks emotional engagement. There isn’t a strand of a human wrestling with an idea and expressing a position. In short, AI-generated content isn’t human.

My reactions to Warner’s book

• In terms of expressive writing, 100% agree. However, his view of “writing” seems to be too narrow. There’s a lot of non-expressive writing. In fact, the bulk of what employees write in corporations is outside the scope of Warner’s book. Not just technical documentation, but reports, procedures, policies, updates, etc. Much of this type of writing (professional writing) is ripe for AI automation. This is a point he fails to acknowledge other than making a few brief passing mentions in places (such as with the bilerate brain comments).
• I get the feeling that non-expressive writing isn’t valuable in Warner’s mind. To him, it’s not real writing. If you’re not thinking and feeling through subjects and articulating your thoughts/arguments in language, is it even a valuable activity? There’s nothing in Warner’s book that would suggest that this type of writing is valuable or worth doing. And yet, most of the reasons for reading are to gather information. For example, tax questions. Technical documentation. Reports, etc. Much of the informational content online (e.g., factual wikipedia articles). Much of this can be outsourced to AI.
• What if we outsourced non-expressive writing to AI, while reserving expressive writing for our own human-writing brains? (Is “expressive” writing even the right term here?)
• Warner doesn’t acknowledge the ways in which AI tools might amplify and augment our writing. (I suspect he’s never had to write technical documentation for something so complicated that only a senior engineer with years of experience in a subject domain can fully understand it.) Try writing that without AI to assist. You end up having to set up multiple meetings with [always busy] engineers, record the meetings, talk through whiteboard explanations, transcribe parts of the recording, etc. Even if you’re not using AI to do the writing, AI can help understand and explain complexity in ways that are transformative for technical writers.

Quotations from the book

(Content in brackets is summarized rather than quoted.)

“My students had been incentivized not to write but instead to produce writing-related simulations, formulaic responses for the purpose of passing standardized assessments.” 5

“My students had been denied the deep pleasures of writing as a process through which you come to know your own mind.” 6

“These people are alienated from the deep meaning and importance of writing as an act of thinking, feeling, and communicating…” 7

“It is frankly bizarre to me that many people find the outsourcing of their own humanity to AI attractive. It is akin to promising to automate our most intimate and meaningful experiences, like outsourcing the love you have for your family because going through the hassle of the times your loved ones try your spirit isn’t worth the trouble.” 7

“Writing is an embodied act of thinking and feeling. Writing is communicating with intention. Yes, the existence of a product at the end of the process is an indicator that writing has happened, but by itself, it does not define what writing is or what it means to the writer or the audience for that writing.” 8

“Writing is thinking. Writing involves both the expression and exploration of an idea, meaning that even as we’re trying to capture the idea on the page, the idea may change based on our attempts to capture it. Removing thinking from writing renders an act not writing.” 11

“Reading and writing are inextricable, and outsourcing our reading to AI is essentially a choice to give up on being human.” 11

“Effective accelerationism” = “a coalition of individuals gathered around a common belief that ‘artificial intelligence and other emerging technologies should be allowed to move as fast as possible, with no guardrails or gatekeepers standing in the way of innovation.’” 29

[Ethics is dismissed in the name of necessary progress.]

[We were getting along fine before ChatGPT — why waste all our water on it now? There’s an irony about using AI to solve climate change while the energy required to power AI hastens climate destruction.]

Alignment = “making sure the interests of the sentient and fully agented AGI are aligned with the interests of humanity.” 37

Effective altruism = “artificial intelligence is the greatest threat to humanity.” 38

[Are the upsides of AI worth the risks?]

[The calculator analogy = getting rid of the boring, mindless work. “Let’s acknowledge that Brynjolfsson lets the question of whether writing can ever be truly mindless go begging, while also setting the claim aside for the moment to probe the calculator/ChatGPT in more depth.” 48

[Are you learning skills that will make you valuable in an increasingly automated world? “What is lost through the use of automation?” 49]

[Calculator analogy shortcoming: calculators empower students to do more advanced math. What does ChatGPT allow students to do? Are they doing more advanced writing? Not really, ChatGPT is doing the writing.]

“Allowing the machine to do that work, at least in theory, allows the human more time to grapple with the larger mathematical concepts and questions. It is making space for more thinking, not less.” 51

[Transhumanistic arguments for AI argue that AI liberates us from human constraints.]

[Reading and writing engage us more than anything else. That’s why this technology is so threatening — the whole intellectual endeavor is at risk.]

“What I want to say about writing is that it is a fully embodied experience. When we do it, we are thinking and feeling. We are bringing our unique intelligences to the table and attempting to demonstrate them to the world, even when our intelligences don’t seem too intelligent.” 58-59

[Warner sees writing as very Montaignesque. Montaigne saw his “essays” as trials, experiments with ideas that he would try to prove out. Writing is a tool for thinking through problems.]

“Writing involves both the expression of an idea and the exploration of an idea—that is, when writing, you set out with an intention to say something, but as part of the attempt to capture an idea, the idea itself is altered through the thinking that happens as you consider your subject. Anyone who has written has experienced one of these mini-epiphanies that is unique to the way humans write.” 61

“When ChatGPT strings together its tokens in the form of syntax, it is not wrestling with an idea.” 63

“Everyone has had the experience of walking away from a piece of writing, frustrated at their inability to capture the idea on the page, only to return to the task a day later and have a solution arrive as if by magic. This isn’t magic; it’s our subconscious working away while we’re doing other things.” 63

“… something occurs to the writer, and there is an impulse or energy suggesting that this notion can be explored and expressed through language. Only then do sentences come into play.” 65

“To write is to care about what has been written.” 6

“Writing is inevitably a process of discovery for the writer.” 66

[LLMs don’t consider the rhetorical situation (writer vs. audience vs. message).]

[What you write is a reflection of who you are, and that’s interesting and valuable to us as humans.]

[At some point, writing changes from thinking to communication and then the thinking part ends.]

“If writing is thinking—and it is—then it must be viewed as an act of our own becoming.” 73

[Thinking changes who you are — writing is an act of becoming.]

[Even writing a book review, there’s an emotional component to writing it and weaving in quotes — writing that review makes you remember, reflect, and feel more than when using AI to assist with the writing.]

“As a fully embodied process, writing is not only thinking, it is also feeling. We conjure emotion through our writing, both in ourselves and in the reader.” 76

[Writing is an act of reflection.]

“[ChatGPT] … has no trouble producing a statement that would pass public muster, while simultaneously saying nothing of consequence.” 78

[AI language is so predictable and cliche as to lack all impact.]

“If we are going to resist this benumbing, we must be mindful that writing is feeling, and if nothing is felt when we are writing, we are missing an opportunity to connect to our own humanity.” 81

[Pay attention to your emotions during writing. Writing engages you on an emotional level. There’s an emotional component to memory, reflection.]

“…even the most mundane writing occasions are opportunities for learning and benefiting from the experience of feeling as we write.” 85

[You benefit from practice as a writer — when you outsource writing to AI, you lose the benefits of that practice.]

“Essentially, we develop best when we ignore that we’re trying to get better at something and instead just do a bunch of stuff that’s related to our big-picture goal. Our orientation should be around finding the best fit for our interests rather than relying on grit because that fit makes it much easier to be gritty.” 100

“Hundreds of experiments show that people improve faster when they alternate between different skills.” qtd in Warner. 101

[Make writing fun and people won’t be so eager to outsource the activity.]

“Reading is thinking and feeling in all the same ways as writing. Reading is a process that allows us to better understand the world and one another, sometimes even achieving something like virtual or alternate reality in our own minds as we join with the thoughts of others.” 115

Qtd from George Saunders: “I think that what any of us pays for when entering into a reading experience is that feeling of seeing another mind at work, and not at work in a rational way. There’s something thrilling about seeing this other mind at work in this blissful and private and self-referential way, and then suddenly your mind joins it.” 115

“…[quoting Sam Bankman-Friend] if you wrote a book, you fucked up, and it should have been a six-paragraph blog post.” 119

[“bulletpointification of books”, from Maris Kreizman’s term] 119

[Warner outsources some of his reading to ChatGPT so he can focus on more deep reading texts. Some researchers refer to a “biliterate” brain, “one that is both capable of the kind of skimming that characterizes reading the internet on screens and the deep reading that helps develop our critical thinking abilities.” 120

[AI alters our relationship with the texts we produce.]

[AI can’t synthesize writing a book with personal experience, arguments, etc. (I’m guessing that one pushback against AI content will be to emphasize personal experience and perspectives as a way to underscore that our writing is human.]

[What problem does ChatGPT solve?] 130

“What if ChatGPT is not genuinely solving a problem but is instead being used to paper over a problem in a way that will cause significantly worse problems down the line?” 131

qtd in: “At the heart of education, at the heart of any learning, is engagement.” 139

[The mode of identifying your gaps and then constructing a curriculum to fill the gaps is the engineering model of engagement, which is what Khanmigo is built on, and it’s shown to repeatedly fail.] “Learning is not about progressing along a continuum or even moving around a map. It is exploring in three dimensions. As a teacher, I have to be prepared for a student to zoom off in an infinite number of possible directions.” 143 [You can’t expect students to progress straight linearly along a learning track. That’s not how engagement works.]

In his classes he tries to make sure that his students “are engaged in a ‘shared inquiry into the subject at hand.’ The goal is to have deep and rich experiences that spur students toward the kind of practicing of their practices that allows them to explore freely rather than move along a pre-mapped line.” 146

“Rather than being a tool to gauge students’ cognitive abilities, tests become an exercise in seeing how well you do on the test. this results in writing instruction that encourages students to work with templates - like the five paragraph essay - while writing according to prescriptive rules.. that are easily scored against a standardized scale but which have little to no relationship with the kinds of experiences that reflected genuine engagement with a challenge of writing inside a rhetorical situation.” 150

“Seeing the capabilities of chatGPT, Michael W. Clune, an English professor at Case Western Reserve University, observed that the application generated “essays that meet all of the official criteria for student writing: they have a thesis; they are polished, coherent, and well-argued; they support their points with evidence. They also lack any trace of surprise or originality, make no new connections, and are devoid of any striking use of language or evidence of individual human sensibility.” 151

“… the most important factor in terms of the quality of a student’s output and the depth and breadth of their learning was how interested they were in the task at hand.” 159

“Unlike the featureless text that chat GPT turns out, human writing is spiky, weird, and messy. This is particularly true when we are in the midst of trying to figure stuff out through writing, which is always going to be the case with students. if I wanted my students to become confident writers I had to let them write, and if I was going to let them write, I had to Value something other than the ability to BS proficiently.” 164

“We don’t only need to teach children to read, we need to make readers.” 169

“Writing is a tool by which we can experience and understand both ourselves and the world at large. I realize that there are people of different minds about this, but to me, that is the core purpose of education, and I’ve conducted my courses in accordance with those beliefs.” 191

“The first draft is the most important part in terms of human involvement because it establishes the intention behind the expression.” 219

“Synthetic text production is a performance of writing, not writing itself. Without having generated a draft from the fuel of my own thoughts, it made no sense to even try to revise or edit that text into a satisfactory column. it would take less time to start from scratch, and I would wind up with a better product.” 219

“Rather than pivoting, I believe we have to orient toward goals that are associated with human flourishing, and make use of artificial intelligence where it is useful in those goals and reject it where it is a hindrance.” 227

“If ChatGPT can do it, it’s probably not worth doing by humans, and it very well may not be worth doing at all.” 241

“In my view, the goal is to create ourselves as individuals through acts of personal discernment. To practice our taste and express our values. We bring these individual selves into communities of other individuals who have their own unique world views. Here, then, is an ecosystem of interdependent individuals, a collection of intelligences existing without being flattened into an algorithm.” 264

“I can testify that writing involves a wonderful kind of difficulty in which our grasp continuously falls short of our reach. I am mere moments from wrapping up the bulk of my work on this book save the inevitable fine-tuning of the editorial process, and because writing is thinking and feeling as part of an embodied process, I am experiencing a kind of buzzing sensation in my head in my hands as my body senses the end of a long, intense process. what a privilege it has been to put every ounce of myself into the effort.” 279

“Our individual ends are assured, but along the way to that inevitability, we should at the very least give ourselves the best chance possible to live.”* 280