Article by Krzysztof Pelc: “We are good at predicting what machines will do better; we are far worse at predicting what people will value differently once that happens. Yet the history of technological disruption suggests a fairly consistent pattern: when one property becomes abundant, perceived value migrates elsewhere. The Arts and Crafts aesthetic thus rose up as a challenge to factory production. Similarly, despite quartz watches making accuracy trivial by the 1970 s, mechanical watches once more dominate the global market by value (Raffaelli 2019). Technological shocks alter not only the goods on offer, but also the basis by which those goods are evaluated. What had seemed central is downgraded; what had been incidental becomes precious.
The direction of this change is invariably towards the human—not out of sentiment, but because in the wake of technological shocks, it is the human aspect that grows distinctive. The advent of large language models (LLMs) is beginning to have a similar effect on all writing. LLMs make verbal fluency cheap, they make competent prose abundant. As that happens, the old premium on flowing prose will weaken. If smoothness can be summoned on demand, smoothness no longer distinguishes. The scarce good will no longer be fluency, but provenance: whether a text can be traced to a particular human sensibility, lived experience, and intention. Call it the flight-to-humanity effect.
Usually, this revaluation works to the humans’ advantage. It’s the phenomenon that protects the radiologist, the craftsperson, the live performer, once their core output is superseded by machines. But writing will likely be an exception.
The problem is that writing is peculiarly ill-suited to certifying its own origins. In most domains, human provenance remains legible in the thing itself. A handmade bowl can bear the mark of its maker; a performer is present in the act; a physician’s judgment is tied to the physical person and their credentials. Writing is different. It arrives as a finished product, stripped of the conditions of its making. The reader sees the result, but not the process that produced it. Novels, essays, love notes, wedding speeches: none carry intrinsic evidence of authorship. This is not simply a practical difficulty. It’s a property of writing itself. And it’s what means that suspicion, once introduced, extends to every text alike…(More)”.
