Post Script | September 11, 2023

*Note to recipient: This letter wasn't written by a machine.

Over the summer, I was assigned to write a feature article for Wheaton magazine on AI and the Liberal Arts. As I so often do, I took the assignment, not because of any expertise but rather real curiosity. Everyone is talking about AI, about the implications for all kinds of industries and vocations, including—very obviously—writing and publishing.

It wasn’t until this assignment that I began to understand the broad capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT. For the article, I interviewed many different Wheaton faculty, including Dr. Ryan Kemp, who teaches philosophy at Wheaton. Between Kemp and others with whom I spoke, there was a varying degree of wariness vs. enthusiasm—though enthusiasm is probably too strong a word to describe any one professor’s reaction. Kemp was especially apprehensive about the deforming effects of this new technology, and when I reached out to him this last week, to verify the accuracy of his quotes, his email response included this postscript at the bottom: *Note to recipient: This letter wasn’t written by a machine.

If you haven’t experimented with ChatGPT or other LLMs, you’re in for a complete shock. The “writing” these text generators can produce is quite “real.” It sounds human—if by this we mean coherent, even persuasive (never mind that their sources are often completely made up). When I asked my three college-aged children whether they had used this technology for writing papers or doing other coursework, they were honest to say, yes, they’d tried it.

There are all kinds of real concerns about AI in the university setting. If computers generate text for the student, is this cheating? Does this short-circuit the learning process, or is text generation on the level of help given by spellcheck and Grammarly? What we do know is that Microsoft Word and others will begin to incorporate LLMs as a feature of their word processors, that people will likely come to see these technologies as perfectly acceptable communication tools.

I certainly have my own opinions. On the whole I’d say: AI will inevitably tempt students (and other writers) to escape the burdens that learning and hard work require, though I can see how this only begs larger questions. What burdens are good burdens, worthy to preserve for the sake of formation? I do use a dishwasher, an automatic washer, even a computer, and I don’t think I’m cheating myself out of formation when I do.

Here I’ll say: go read Alfred Borgmann or better, Christina Crook’s book, Good Burdens, who deals with Borgmann. In short, if you think it’s always better to relieve a burden than to conserve it, you’re going to be in some trouble when it comes to Christian discipleship. The complete distaste for burden is the kind of thing that leads us to acedia, or sloth as the monks and nuns thought of it. (Acedia is an important theme of In Good Time, so I hope you’ve read and paid attention.)

Formation is certainly at stake when we talk about AI. As students, as writers, as teachers, as pastors, as anyone called to work with words and be formed in that work: if we want to be the kind of people who love with words, whether this means writing a book, a blog post, or an email, we aren’t going to let machines do our work for us.

But here’s how this AI question pertains to you, dear readers. To be clear, AI will tempt us as writers because you have an insatiable appetite for content. You are the endless accumulator of words. Seriously, I want you to take a quick inventory of the content you consume in a regular week. What do you watch and read? Stream and subscribe? How many sermons do you hear in a week? How many Substack posts arrive in your inbox? How many books from the library? How many packages from Amazon?

Once you’ve taken a quick inventory of your regular content, I want you to ask: how much real attention do you pay? How much “information” do you retain? At the end of a week, how much do you remember? At the end of a month? At the end of a year?

Does any of this mountain of content change you? Or do words (and images) just fill in the crevices of your life with noise, keeping you busied enough to ignore other things like pain, real responsibilities of love, overdue business with God?

I am not wagging my finger at you. I count myself among those drowning in content—and often choosing to do exactly that. But here’s one thing you might consider doing, something that will hold you more accountable to the content you ingest. Pay for it. As soon as you start paying for it, you begin counting the real costs (and limits) of your attention. Hopefully you also begin counting the costs for that producer to get that content into your hand. My friend and fellow writer, Lore Wilbert, wrote about getting paid for writing, and I think she has started a great conversation.

Some of you have offered to pay for the content that you’re getting here, and each time I have turned you down. I have always thought to myself, I can do this for free if my subscribers go buy one of my books. I’ve known at least this much, that I can’t write more books if people aren’t reading the ones I’ve already written. (Publishers do have bottom lines.) But maybe my tact has been wrong? Maybe I’ve not allowed you to invest in these words and in this work?

What I can’t do is offer more content here, offering extras to paying readers and Monday letters to everyone else. No, nothing is changing around here for you. If you want to receive these letters, you can get them for free. And here’s what I can promise you: a machine won’t have written them. But if you want to patronize this work because you feel a sense of calling to do so, then I am not here to stop you as I have in the past. Even better, if you take your content inventory and Post Script doesn’t make the final cut, I will celebrate your decision to unsubscribe.

I think there is a reason the Bible calls us to be doers of the Word, not hearers only. Hearing can give the smug impression that we’re learning. Doing, on the other hand, is the harder work.

Less content, more change. Maybe then we won’t need computers doing the work for us.