The dangers of autocomplete

Why we should resist AI's attempts to eliminate friction from writing

Writer’s block may be a thing of the past. Through the interface of a chatbot, a writer can now dip their ink into the collective knowledge of humanity and extract whatever insights they seek. Every thought can be completed, every question answered, every idea elaborated. 

Autocomplete itself isn’t a new phenomenon, but it has come a long way since the nascent efforts of predictive text (a form of autocorrection), and Gmail’s ‘Smart Reply’ and ‘Smart Compose’, rolled out in quick succession in 2017-2018, which offer to complete sentences and can finish your own.

Smart Compose’s efficient and humourless email manages to take all the excitement out of tacos

Powered by large language models such as GPT-3, chatbots are moving past critiques of their dry, monotonous tone. These models have the ability to generate outputs that appear human-like. As chatbots incorporate techniques such as style transfer, they will even learn to mimic our own individual writing voice.

AI-powered writing assistants promise to take matters a step further by eradicating the struggle of writing. Take Lex, a word editor that will finish your semi-formed sentences at the drop of a hat (more precisely, at the tap of +++). Here it is with an alternative to my opening paragraph - my only contribution is the part in bold:

This form of autocomplete is designed to solve the problem, according to Lex creator Nathan Baschez, of being ‘stuck’ and not knowing what to write next. By completing your sentences, Lex ‘keeps you in the writing flow’, unimpeded by external distractions or unproductive internal musings. The same is claimed for Jasper, ‘a new way to beat writer’s block’, according to CEO Dave Rogenmoser. Here, the promise is to autoinitiate your writing: you simply jot down a blog post title, identify your audience, tone of voice and language through drop-down menus, and Jasper will produce multiple versions of an opening paragraph for your blog. The blank page dilemma is no more!

Tools like Lex and Jasper, and a wealth of others such as Sudowrite that target fiction writing, mean we are only ever a keyboard peck away from plugging the gaps in our written thoughts. Perhaps we can retire the cliche of the tortured artist and look forward to unleashing a ceaseless burst of creativity without toil or wasted effort.

If only writing were that simple.

The current crop of AI writing tools, in their attempts to expunge struggle from the writing process, miss two key insights:

1. Writing is thinking, and thinking is writing 

The challenges of writing are intellectual as much as psychological, involving a process of sifting through our confusions - about what we think, what we should be thinking, or what others might be thinking. This process of making sense of things lies at the heart of creative expression. 

Writing, in particular, is a form of combinatorial play - every sentence involves active selection, an effort to stitch together words to express a thought or to capture a sentiment in the right tone. 

A struggle to write may actually be a trigger to reflect more deeply, and writing itself - when undertaken in an exploratory, ruminatory way - can help advance our thoughts. When we allow a bot to complete our half-formed ideas, we forfeit the opportunity to think and write our way through obfuscation.

Used purposefully, autocomplete does not have to stop us from thinking deeply. By serving us counterarguments and doubling up as a brainstorming partner, it may take our writing in completely unintended directions, or inspire a new way of phrasing an idea that may have previously eluded us. But when viewed primarily as a way of removing friction, a means of engineering a state of ‘writing flow’, these tools threaten to undermine our ability to make sense of what we know; to generate and connect ideas for ourselves.

2. Discomfort is essential to creative expression

AI tools promise to eliminate any hint of turbulence from the writing process. The creators of autocomplete tools share the view that ‘no matter how you think of it, writer’s block is a supreme waste of time’. It is a psychological pitfall that stops us getting to our first draft as quickly as possible.

Source: https://www.nfx.com/post/generative-tech 

The catch-all term ‘pit of despair’ in the above graph lazily encompasses the most essential aspects of writing: grappling with uncertainty, confusion and insecurity, and allowing time and space to consolidate ideas and form new associations. Writing is anything but smooth or linear; it may even defy mathematical description.

The idea that struggle is crucial to learning is well-established. Being comfortable with discomfort is what enables us to take risks and leads to a greater sense of achievement than if we had retreated to gentler waters. This is certainly true of problem solving: the mild relief that comes from being fed an elegant solution is overwhelmed by a sense of disappointment that we are not able to produce one for ourselves. In writing as in problem solving, some degree of struggle - not a crushing inner turmoil, but a struggle pitched at the right level of difficulty - can be a fertiliser of our most creative thoughts.

My (Junaid) book Mathematical Intelligence has a chapter dedicated to temperament which, in this context, concerns knowing when to keep our knowledge-feeding impulses at bay. It is in periods of difficulty, when I have stepped away from a maths problem, that my most creative thoughts have emerged. The same has been argued for different forms of creativity. Social psychologist Graham Wallace popularised a four-stage model of the creative process - preparation, incubation, illumination, verification. In the second stage, our minds tinker with ideas even when we have taken a break from actively thinking about them. Incubation is a powerful way of activating our most novel thoughts, especially when we get stuck. It is most potent when alternated with periods of task-related conscious thought (alas, it does not suffice to snooze our way to producing an artistic creation). Using autocomplete to ‘unblock’ ourselves not only bypasses this important stage, but prevents us from working through the issues that underlie our writing inertia. 

Coaches > Oracles

As appealing as the prospect of an automated writing assistant may seem, far better would be a writing coach that resists the impulse to spoon-feed us ‘the answer’. A coach prompts us to pause, reflect, reconsider, revise. Lex is a far cry from the ‘thought partner’ it claims to be. It more closely resembles Gmail’s Smart Compose: someone always ready to interject with sensible, middle-of-the-road suggestions, foreclosing possibilities before we have even had a chance to consider them. 

If we want to make sense of what we are writing, and why, we can dispense with pseudo-oracles imposing their ideas on us. We have to think for ourselves which, by extension, means writing for ourselves. To whatever extent you use autocomplete, use it with abundant caution.