How AI Captured Our Writing

Added: 2026-05-12

[00:00:00]AI is destroying our language. Many people are starting to notice that advertisements, commercials, novels, screenplays, messages from the White House, political speeches abroad, uh movie uh scripts, theater scripts, social media posts and captions are all starting to sound the same. It's that LLM style that everyone's using. Sounds so basic. You have this level polite structured tone. This common topus of comparison. It's not X, it's Y. Common phrases like let's delve into something or talk about how something is profound and language is flattening. And the result is that so is our thinking. And I find myself uh who was drawn to the comparison topos which is actually really useful if you're a teacher avoiding that just so it doesn't sound like a machine. And this is something that research backs up that the style is starting to proliferate. Statistics have shown that since the emergence of publicly available LLMs, certain words have started appearing with increasing frequency. what you know words like delve and profound make the list as do others like commendable apparently um meticulous comprehend these are also words that are just being used a lot by the LLMs and in an Oxford report by Mariana Adami researchers claim that language is shaping fast as a result of this LLM speak which is going to become the new norm they fear people are going to start speaking and thinking being like machines, which is the other way around than what the machines were supposed to do originally. The machines were supposed to speak like human beings, but there's this reflexive uh relationship between the two that people are starting to notice. And the result of which would reshape human culture for the worse, and it's already shaping, especially the next generation of students who are learning how to write with the help of machines. Researchers are calling this the homogenization of style, meaning the assimilation or the flattening of style.

[00:02:11]Everything is starting to sound the same. But if we're going to understand what this is going to do to our future, and how to stop it, we're going to have to understand what style is, why we need it, and how this circumstance that AI, this problem that AI is giving us is actually putting pressure on us to think about how important language is. And that I think could lead to a renaissance of good writing. And we see this pattern recur in history. You know, a new medium, more technology is invented. The older medium loses monopoly and artists have to pivot to what the new medium cannot do. And I think same thing's happening with writing. So writing is probably going to change in the next few years and continue to change. But we could see what I've been calling a new renaissance. something that I've been describing here because of these pressures, not because of AI and because it's great because it's not, but because it's making us re-evaluate what it means to be human. It's really strange this question like what is a human being has not resurfaced with such intensity as it has today since the 1400s. But first, let's talk about style and what it is and why it matters. A lot of people think of style as fancy language involving showing off. But this can't be further from the truth because style is inescapable. It's essentially personality. Personality in writing. It is an expression of your individual consciousness structured by language structured into language. Therefore, style is inescapable. A person can sometimes you know you hear people I have no style um fancying that because they speak plainly and directly they affect no style but uh to speak plainly and directly is a style in itself. Style is personality.

[00:04:01]It is identity in a way. The great 18th century writer uh Jonathan Swift 17th century writer as well defined style as proper words in proper places. This is a simple and elegant definition that tells us what we might expect about style. It has to do with our handling of words, which words we use and in what order.

[00:04:22]But there's also there's also this social element to style in that it exists for the purpose of others. Uh the literary critic Arthur Quiller Couch said that style is like good manners.

[00:04:35]And what he means is that style comes from the attempt to make yourself understandable to someone else. And that is inherently a social function. It's sharing oneself with the world or with another mind. And what greater thing could could we do as as communicating beings? The ancients could not have had a higher view of style and language themselves. uh the Hebrews had probably the highest regard of the verbal art simply uh if not only because they uh had that injunction against images. But if you look in the classical world, Plato and Aristotle devote pages to the subject and Cicero and Quintilian are all great rhetorics who have who have poured out excellent writings about writing and the high prizing of language and style flourished in the western tradition from Plato uh all the way up to really the 20th century. today. I think it was the Yeah, it was the 7th century theologian Maximus the Confessor who said that language is the symbol of the soul's cognitive energy. That's a very high view of language and a lot of people still have a high view of language. It is possible to have a high view of language and this very high view of language enjoyed a long life in um many traditions. It's got a long life of rhetoric in the western tradition all the way up to today when it seems uniquely compromised in a way that it never has been before. So let's talk about that. I mean, if you if you read the great English writers, read read Chaucer's Trous and Crusade or Shakespeare's plays or John Dunn's sermons and you'll be struck by the painful contrast between the marketkedly superior use of the English language in the past in that which is common today.

[00:06:27]Reading the essays of Joseph Addison, you'll be struck by the clear flowing eloquence, the transparent lucidity of gorgeous, simple pros. He makes me proud to speak English. Uh he's one of my favorite writers. Uh read Samuel Johnson. You'll hear the measured uh of the measured thoughts unfolding in sentences with gentle undulations of the English rhythm. the sentences leading up often to this very conclusive punch.

[00:06:58]This is what Aristotle called the periodic style where the sentences are made up of of balancing parts and several interconnected members that lead to a sense of the whole being revealed at the very end of the sentence. The rhetoric Hugh Blair called uh that style the periodic style the most musical and dignified style. Read Jane Austin and you'll be confronted with a pros style that will often hide a satirical or gently mocking smile. Read the oratory of Frederick Douglas and you'll be met with a red-hot Jeremiads in the mournful laments of one of the greatest speech writers in American history. It was really the radio and the TV that kind of killed this great tradition of speech writing, but that's another episode. So, why do we need style?

[00:07:46]All of these writers that I just mentioned and more know that language is the most appropriate medium through which to encounter human thought through which to share human thought. Language changes the heart. It stirs the emotions. It externalizes reasoning and thought, makes it known. It is the great instrument of democracy by which the will of the many is articulated.

[00:08:11]Such has it always been, and that's why we still need it. Now, I don't believe the answer is to return to this archaic language of Spencer or Shakespeare or to cosplay Samuel Johnson in the 18th century. No, it would not do us any good to strut around like a child might stumble around the house in his father's shoes and jacket making an awkward show.

[00:08:32]Uh, that would that would be degrading and and a poor imitation. That wouldn't do us any good. What we need instead is a high view of language to rediscover ourselves within language to encounter others through language. Society is shaped through language. Culture is shaped through language. Spirit comes externalized into language. We may indeed learn from the past writers and emulate um the best the best that they have given. And this is what the very best writers of every age have done. If you look at John Keats, he looked to Edmund Spencer and the poets of the Elizabethan era and uh he discovered in their in their poems a vocabulary that was rich and sensuous and he carried forward the best that he discovered by developing his own sensuous and rich style. William Werdsworth looked to the blank verse of John Milton and not only emulated but improved John Milton's style. He improved what he found there and became the best blank verse writer of the 19th century. We need not look upon the great writers of the past as monuments of worship gazing with all struck and paralyzing piety. They are models for us and we can critique them.

[00:09:55]They are also imperatives that tell us what to do. Such monuments look down on us and say, "The same human blood that nourished me circulates in you. The same human heart beats within us both. The same potential possible like um like Rilka's torso of Apollo, they tell us to mute Denandon, you must change your life. This is what you could become is what great writing tells us.

[00:10:25]And so greatness of the past is not there just to judge us. It challenges us to make new to to imagine more to improve language and it points to opportunities of the present. But what are those opportunities now? And how can we carry forward the best of language in addressing the needs of the present? And I think there are a few ways that this problem that we have in the AI postdigital age could produce a new renaissance of writing, a new style of writing. And the first thing to say is this that at this stage I'm very much against AI. I think there could be some proper uses and I don't think that it's really worth the the the cost on the planet. And as somebody who has taught college writing, I've seen firsthand the detrimental effects these tools are having on young minds. People often compare AI to the printing press, which is actually really offensive to anyone who actually knows history. The printing press led to a rise of literacy. It spread knowledge. It made writing. It refined writing. AI is making culture less literate and stupider. But perhaps because of AI, because of what it's doing, our culture is becoming aware of style in a way that we haven't seen culture become aware of style since the English Renaissance, let's say, at least in the English- speakaking world. During the English Renaissance, we had this this surge of literacy. In England, one of the greatest revivals of culture was seen in rhetoric. That is the art of speaking and writing. Writing manuals proliferated during this period.

[00:12:04]Excellent rhetoric manuals at least 17 by the end of the 16th century were produced. Thomas Wilson's The Art of Rhetoric, George Putinham's The Art of English, Poezy. I mean, these were books that if you read Shakespeare, if you read George Herbert, John Dunn, any of the great preachers, Sydney or poets or Spencer, they they all knew their rhetoric. They all knew the arts of language. And that's not really something that's being taught anymore.

[00:12:30]and people from the Silicon Valley are pretending like you know you no longer need to know the arts of language because because the machines can can produce this very awful style. And um I've talked to people who think they've trained LLMs to speak in their voice or to to affect a certain style, but I I I have yet to see anything that's really convincing. But back in the English Renaissance, people were aware of style in the way that they'd never been. And as a result you had you had one of the most productive periods of English literature. It was the age of Sir Phip Sydney of Mary Sydney Herbert of Edmund Spencer William Shakespeare Ben Johnson.

[00:13:08]And I think that as we see the flattening of style increase in the public sphere a reactionary culture of writing is going to emerge. And we've seen this pattern before. For example, when the first Kodak camera was introduced in the 1880s, it made capturing beauty easier than before. No longer really would you have to go to an art gallery or borrow a tourist guide book to see what landscapes were like in Switzerland or England's Lake District.

[00:13:38]Now you have photography. You no longer need portrait artists. You no longer need landscape painters. The artists, the painters responded by asking, "What can this technology not do?"

[00:13:52]They thought, "A photograph can document. It can capture almost every detail of a landscape with scientific precision, but it cannot depict how the landscape feels to the viewer." And this is partly what gave rise to the impressionist movement in painting. um the same decade that saw the the first Kodak camera saw the rise of impressionism which wanted to depict the landscape not really as it was seen in a photograph but the way it was felt through its atmospheric emotional beauty. You know, Wdsworth too in the 19th century responding to how language had become very scientific during the enlightenment period, Wdsworth said that his poetry was trying not to represent what things looked like, but how they felt to be looked like. And that's exactly what the impressionists were doing, too. You see a similar thing happen in the printing world around the same time in the 18 uh 80s and 90s an era when books were being mass-produced along with everything else. William Morris the English socialist artist started his Kelmscot press as a long protest against capitalistic commodification of art and he made these artisan books by hand according to methods of the printing press. I mean, he had the wood blocks designed. He had engravings by his friend Edward Burn Jones. He made custom type faces where it was actually another printing press that it all had to be made. And everything about these books was done painstakingly by hand. And there was a sudden shift from mass production to handmade art that cherished the process instead of the product. In the modernist period around early 1900s, you have this new kind of commodification of things and of distraction and the modernist poets were responded to that. I think of of Rhina Maria Rulka, the German language poet who developed a new kind of poetry partly in response of this of like he called it thing poetry, dingadict uh and it was about the poetry of things and so he would take objects, animals, plants as subjects of his poetry but it was all about perception. And it was all about the exchange of imaginative attention when the thing itself takes on more than just a material existence but as something that's connected psychically through the act of attention itself. I think Rilka's dingadict his poetry of things is a response to that to some of the technological innovations that are happening at the time. And if you want to study Rilka's thing poetry with us, we're starting of course in June where we're reading his new poems.

[00:16:48]And so you see this happening in the art sphere uh in the age of the factories and technological innovations. Well, today we're seeing something else occur with slow art and slow reading, what I practice and teach on my platform first.

[00:17:02]Uh and close reading. A lot of the most popular art accounts I think on any given social medium all involve a look at the process. I mean the if you go to like the Instagram, the artists who are on Instagram, you visit their pages, they're showing you how they're applying the brush. Uh they're showing you how they're blending colors. They're not just showing the finished work. Uh it's all about the process, too. And I find this a response to uh on one hand uh uh perhaps capitalistic um tendencies of of taking over art and also AI's ability to kind of generate something that looks very good on the surface but really doesn't hold up under any kind of aesthetic scrutiny. So there may be a similar resistance happening in writing now. Stu I I think that students they really do want to learn how to write well. um the ones who really care. I think students who previously used AI to write their papers are going to protest and go back to older modes of learning how to write like I mean the oldest mode is copying out novels by hand into a notebook or copying out essays into a notebook. Um I used to do that with Joseph Addison's essays because you know Ben Franklin did that as well. And Johnson recommends um that if anyone wants to learn how to write, you must give your days and nights to the study of Joseph Addison and his spectator essays. Uh find somebody whom you like, whose style is like matches with your personality and learn how they do it. I think people are also going to start giving more attention to discovering their own style, which is a lot like discovering who you are. When you're thinking aloud to yourself, when you're arguing, you know, the process of writing and thinking and reasoning and coming to any kind of opinion and conclusion are all part of the same process. You learn how your mind works.

[00:18:59]You learn about yourself in a way that once you outsource it to AI, you you you lose something there. So, I think people are going to return to journaling, which is a time-tested method of understanding yourself and how to think. go back and read Emerson's journals, Ralph Waldo Emerson or or Henry David Thorough's journals. His his are wonderful. See what he's writing about. He's noticing when the snow returns in spring. He's noticing how the light looks in a mud puddle. He's noticing the the plants that grow at the tops of pine trees and he's climbing the trees to find them. I mean, there's so many things you can write about just through observation.

[00:19:40]And I think this is going to lead to a discovery, a rediscovery of rhetoric which has been neglected by many universities for decades now. In the words of the great essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson, there is more wool in flax in the fields. There are new lands, new men, new thoughts. Let us demand our own works and laws and worship. And that is something that AI cannot do. And that's something that we can learn as artisan writers, as artists. And if you are interested in furthering your own education and your attention to style and beauty in writing, come and join us on vers, which is where I'm teaching courses. Um, we have courses on how to write poetry, how to study rhetoric, how to close readad great works of literature, and we're giving, we're devoting our attention to the arts of language. members uh can join at a very cheap price, monthly rate, but we also offer scholarships to young people. So, if you are a student, uh definitely come join us. I think that there's more hope uh based on what based on how bad AI is making things for every everyone. Uh and I do think it's bringing an awareness into culture that could yield could bring about a cultural revival of writing and that we're going to see some new styles emerging in response to AI and in protest against it. So to everyone uh who watched on YouTube, thanks for watching and until next