We are only at the beginning of the age of artificial intelligence (AI). Every powerful new idea arrives twice: first as a provocation, then as a problem.

It is not surprising to see that popular and scholarly responses have lurched between uncritical enthusiasm and reflexive alarm. But before we mourn what AI threatens, we should ask what we’ve been defending — and whether it deserves defending.

In Philosophy in a New Key, American thinker Susanne Langer argues that powerful ideas initially generate exaggerated hopes and fears before society settles into confronting the real problems they create. AI appears to be following precisely this trajectory.

Scholars and researchers are warning that overreliance on AI undermines independent thinking and erodes key cognitive and executive functions. Even literature professors are worried about AI. Micah Nathan, a fiction writing professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), described feeling hurt upon discovering that two of his students had used AI to write their workshop stories. Meghan O’Rourke, a poet and creative writing professor at Yale, wrote of an unease she struggled to name — a sense that AI produces writing that is “mimetic of thought, but not quite thought itself.”

Critics worry that AI will erode the cognitive benefits of writing. But beneath those concerns lies a deeper assumption: that writing is the privileged medium of thought. History tells a more complicated story

Critics worry that AI will erode the cognitive benefits of writing. But beneath those concerns lies a deeper assumption: that writing is the privileged medium of thought. History tells a more complicated story

However, the scholarly literature on AI and both professors’ essays share a common assumption that is so deep that it goes almost entirely unexamined. Their essays implicitly elevate writing as the highest and most authoritative form of thinking. That premise deserves scrutiny, especially at the beginning of the AI era.

Writing as an Instrument of Control

Scholars, including archaeologists, historians and anthropologists, have argued that writing did not emerge........

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