Is writing a human skill?

I started my day reading a text by one of the greatest authors of our time, Douglas Rushkoff (I recently had the pleasure of interviewing him for the podcast EduVoices).

In this text from December 22, he talks about ChatGPT, a machine-learning application designed to generate human-like texts.

I remember the applications we still use in universities to check for plagiarism, comparing supposedly original texts with databases and platforms, and reaching a percentage of similarity. When new technologies for text creation like ChatGPT appear, the tools available to identify authorship become obsolete.

For me, the main point in this debate is that writing is one of the ways in which we can make other people see our ideas. Writing is a vehicle to disseminate and transform ideas into new possibilities. When we write what we think and see in our daily lives, this expression becomes a transforming power for others and ourselves, because writing gives us an additional step in our knowledge construction process: an additional layer of reflection.

Writing, painting, singing, and drawing, as well as many other forms of corporal, linguistic or artistic expression, are ways to show who we are, what we think, and what we want.

They are ways to show what we dream of.

Each of the forms of human expression is a way to make us see and promote further reflection in ourselves and others. It is a way to bring tacit knowledge to the world and create cycles of knowledge transformation.

Writing, like all the other potentials and possibilities we have as humans, depends partly on technique and wholly on our humanity. It depends on embracing the errors, erasing the lines, and correcting the spelling. It depends on rethinking our beliefs, and our conclusions, on thinking about how what we do affects others.

It depends above all on a unique human competence: creativity.

We can have robots and machine-learning applications that simulate what we do, but it seems to me that the cost of this simulation, compared to the novelty it can bring us, is infinite, as any division by zero.

Obviously, there are countless positive applications of these technologies, which can potentially make the lives of humans easier and allow us to think of new future possibilities. But to expect that a machine can creatively generate a human expression seems so absurd that I believe we would never see this sentence written by a ChaGPT’s rationality.

Creativity is what distinguishes us as humans. All the different forms of expression we develop represent the transposition of this creativity from our bodies and minds to the real world.

We are creative and distinctive beings, not repeaters, and the new does not come from the ordinary, from repetition, but from the difference, from the uncomfortable, from the possibilities.

In fact, the new comes from our creativity.

Suggested readings:

Kolb, D. A. (1984). Experiential learning: Experience as the source of learning and development. New Jersey: Prentice-Hall.

ZURLO, Francesco. Design Strategico. In: XXI Secolo (vol. Gli spazi e le arti). Roma: Enciclopedia Treccani, 2010. Disponível em: http://www.treccani.it/enciclopedia/design-strategico_%28XXI-Secolo%29/.