I recently read Bret Stephens’s anti-AI op-ed, and it is frustrating how much traction those trying to shut down the use of AI in publishing seem to be gaining.

Last month, according to The Guardian, a $2 million crime-novel deal collapsed amid questions about the author’s use of AI. The discourse around these cases seems devoid of a nuanced understanding of what writing is—or what it has the potential to become.

Stephens argues that writing by hand, or at least composing language oneself, is a critical part of the thinking process, and that outsourcing that process to AI erodes an essential intellectual skill.

In Plato’s Phaedrus, Socrates makes a strikingly similar argument about writing itself: that committing words to text would weaken memory and degrade the richer intellectual discipline of oral thought.

The irony is hard to miss.

This pattern repeats throughout the history of new media.

Charles Baudelaire attacked photography as a refuge for failed or lazy painters, yet he failed to anticipate the catalytic role the camera would play in freeing painting from the burden of strict representation. Photography did not destroy visual art. It helped create the conditions for Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, and modernism.

John Philip Sousa warned that recorded........

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