Against the Bullshit Machines

John Warner argues for the fundamental irrelevance of LLMs to the parts of the heart and mind that we unlock through the practice of writing.

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More Than Words
How to Think About Writing in the Age of AI
by John Warner
Basic Books, 320 pp., $30

LATELY, EVERY COLLEGE ENGLISH TEACHER I KNOW has been struggling to write an “AI policy.” Even in using that language—and this is one of many excellent points that John Warner makes in his galvanizing new book, More Than Words—we give up too much conceptual ground. LLMs aren’t intelligent, either artificially or in any other way. They cannot “write” the papers that students coax out of them, because, as Warner argues, “Large language models do not ‘write.’ They generate syntax. They do not think, feel, or experience anything. They are fundamentally incapable of judging truth, accuracy, or veracity.” Nor did they “read” the texts on which they were trained (and “trained” itself is arguably another misnomer). They solve a probability problem—what words are more likely to appear next to other words, given set constraints—at impressive speeds as reservoirs of drinking water are repurposed to cool enormous server racks. As Warner himself puts it: “Fetching tokens based on weighted probabilities is not the same process as what happens when humans write.” The LLM, he concludes in his opening salvo, is thus a machine that produces “bullshit” in the Harry Frankfurt sense of the term: content to which truth or falsehood are simply irrelevant criteria.

Warner’s latest is a thoughtful, deft, and funny argument about what writing is, why machines can’t do it, and why we should therefore continue giving the young and old many chances to learn it. It is Warner’s third book about higher education, by my count, and his third about the teaching of writing. (He has also written a novel and a book of short stories, and he is a humorist of some repute, at least among us younger Gen X-ers who used to forward his McSweeney’s squibs to our least disliked co-workers.) In 2019, he published Why They Can’t Write: Killing the Five-Paragraph Essay and Other Necessities, which has become something of a cult favorite among college writing teachers. That next year, he published The Writer’s Practice, a useful textbook. The year after that, he produced Sustainable. Resilient. Free., which proposes that we treat all college as a form of infrastructure: modestly budgeted, service oriented, and free to all, much as certain enlightened state governments now treat community college. He also writes a weekly book column for the Chicago Tribune and a Substack. (Perhaps his next book can cover time management.)

What, to Warner, is writing? It’s what happens when you simultaneously express and explore an idea, discovering, as you go along, whether in successive sentences that demur from and argue with each other or in the successive drafts by which you first stage the debate and then hide it away, what you actually do and don’t think. Warner’s account of the ways we use writing to think is warm, personal, illustrated with his own on-point anecdotes. He argues here and elsewhere for the value of good teaching, but his best argument is carried in the memories: the passionate eccentric who mentored Warner through MFA school and once called him on the phone, at home, to gently explain to Warner that he had used the word “penultimate” incorrectly in class; the elementary school teacher who made Warner’s entire class write instructions for making a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, then forced them all to follow their own directions to the letter and eat the messy results. We think using all sorts of modalities, of course—there are innumerable ways in which the average member of an illiterate, isolated Amazonian tribe is smarter than I am; intelligence is contextual, and I have no idea what berries will and won’t kill me. But because writing freezes and objectifies our thoughts, it’s a uniquely powerful tool for getting a little ironic distance from them.

Equally, writing can sometimes reveal our feelings to us, even elicit them, as if from nowhere, as Warner illustrates with a powerful story about how a small plot twist in his novel, The Funny Man (2011), allowed him to fully grieve the death of his father: “Writing that scene, five years on, I cried harder than I ever had at the time of my father’s death.” Feelings are even stranger than thoughts, if indeed the two can be distinguished—to me, they feel like different states of the same matter. And, in addition to being a way to think and to feel, it’s a practice, an accretion of discrete skills, experiences, and habits of mind. Obviously, machines can do none of this, and we don’t need them to. The whole project is strangely beside the point, as though we built a machine that could harvest our food and then built another machine to consume, digest, and excrete it, and then gave over much of the world’s arable land to this project.

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I APPRECIATE EVERY WORD THAT WARNER WRITES, and yet as I read his books about teaching, I always feel a mounting anxiety and impatience—not his fault, but occasioned by him. He articulates simply and clearly what is distinctive about the work that students do when they start to truly use writing as a tool for thinking, and the role that teachers can play in making that happen; as a first-year writing teacher, I read these passages and feel vindicated. And then, as the examples and stories multiply, each of them throwing yet another precious accomplishment of this nation’s historically unique (and increasingly imperiled) higher-education system into relief, I start to feel as though I’m counting all our potential losses, too—all the opportunities that will be lost if English 101 goes the way of, say, high-school Latin. And I think, Everything Warner is saying is true, but the people who need to understand it have a professional interest in not doing so.

Warner makes this point rather forcefully by comparing the current hyping of LLMs to the now-forgotten hyping of Massive Open Online Courses a decade ago. The will to “disrupt” higher education seems to run far ahead of the means. It will continue looking for them. Warner himself summarizes my anxiety, right at the beginning of the book:

Deep down, I believe that ChatGPT by itself cannot kill anything worth preserving. My concern is that out of convenience, or expedience, or through carelessness, we may allow these meaningful things to be lost or reduced to the province of a select few rather than being accessible to all.

“Worth preserving” is a key phrase here. One of Warner’s most important arguments, which he made at greater length in Why They Can’t Write, is that we have already given over too much of the writing teacher’s time, especially at the elementary and secondary levels, to activities that aren’t worth preserving—to things that the robots actually can do just fine. To write an essay that contains exactly one thesis, with three subclaims separated by commas, which each correspond to the topic sentence of the body paragraphs, and which is kept rigorously free from any personal insights (your teachers won’t know how to grade those anyway): We probably can leave this as an exercise for machines. They’re good at reproducing empty formalisms. Both Republican and Democratic administrations, both the public and private sector, have colluded in reducing English class to this sort of exercise, though of our two parties—The Supporters of a Chastened Oligarchy With Many Democratic Characteristics on one side, and the Supporters of an Oligarchy That Drives 125 in a School Zone on the other—it’s obvious whose agenda this system best serves.

As for me, I don’t want to be some ketamine-addicted tech guy’s stenographer, and I want my students to have better options as well. The “AI” policy on which I finally landed was thus an outright ban of ChatGPT and similar programs for any purposes other than copyediting. I justified it with these words: “The point of this class is to equip you to write better than a robot.” I enforce it—in the absence of any remotely reliable “AI writing detector”—by giving failing grades to bullshit.