With AI finishing your sentences, what will happen to your unique voice on the page?
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It’s a familiar feeling: You start a text message, and your phone’s auto-complete function suggests several choices for the next word, ranging from banal to hilarious. “I love…” you, or coffee? Or you’re finishing an email, and merely typing the word “Let” prompts your app to suggest “Let me know if you have any questions” in light gray text.
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Predictive language technologies have become so routine – baked into smartphones, email services and chatbots – that we barely notice them anymore. But they raise a difficult question: What happens to a writer’s unique voice when AI routinely completes their thoughts – or generates them altogether from scratch?
As the chair of a large English department – and as a scholar who researches the effects of predictive writing – I’ve witnessed firsthand the challenges that generative AI systems such as ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude pose for individual expression.
This technology has been incorporated into the writing process so fully that it’s almost impossible to imagine encountering a scene from the not-so-distant past: a writer, alone, with a pen and a piece of paper, wrestling with how to best translate their ideas, arguments and stories into something legible and interesting.
Predictive text leads to predictive writing
As many scholars have noted, though, this vision of writing was never...