Bart Blog

It’s surprisingly easy to ask AI to write coherent and polished text on just about anything. A couple of our keystrokes result in thousands of words. We’ve got our personal speechwriter, editor, and literary coach. And if we ask it to use the Atlantic style of writing – it will gladly do that. Asking AI to write the text in “my own voice” will end up with the LLM asking us back: “What is your own voice?”

The same question must have been asked of Kennedy by Ted Sorensen multiple times. Sorensen was the official presidential speechwriter. His role was to help, not to do the work. The idea originated with Kennedy, the initial words as well – then the speechwriter disappears for some time, and comes back with the speech written. Sound familiar? This is the same mode of operation we have right now. Only carried out by a human. An interesting note is that Sorensen was writing speeches, not notes or formal documents. The domain was human talking to humans. His sensibility was there, but he inhabited Kennedy.

The accountability of words

The words carry accountability. If you speak or write, there is no hiding behind an LLM. It’s yours – you own every letter and punctuation mark. You own every idea, direction, emotion the text evokes. Sorensen drew the line in the same place:

If a man in a high office speaks words which convey his principles and policies and ideas and he’s willing to stand behind them and take whatever blame or therefore credit go with them, [the speech is] his.

— Ted Sorensen

Kennedy understood that. This is why he was very active in the process of writing his speeches – selecting subject matter, themes, arguments, conclusions:

John Kennedy was the true author of all of his speeches and writings. They set forth his ideals and ideas, his decisions and policies, his knowledge of history and of politics. He played a role in every major speech, selecting the subject matter and themes, arguments and conclusions.

— Ted Sorensen

Kennedy was facing stakes and outcomes that only a handful of people had ever encountered. His words carried the weight of the whole world.

His ‘mere words’ about Soviet nuclear missiles in Cuba helped resolve the worst crisis the world has ever known.

— Ted Sorensen

We don’t face the same tension writing with AI, hopefully. But the constraint is the same. The outcome will always be ours.

The risk of passive collaboration

It’s easy to let the AI drive the narrative, ideas, and conclusions. It’s easy because it’s so simple. “Write it…” and the produced output is coherent, makes logical claims, and feels like something we could read in an online article (which actually means something totally different today compared to three years ago). This feels like a shortcut, which could be a good thing. But it is not even a shortcut. It’s a deception. The real writing comes from interrogating our own ideas, thinking deliberately on the topic, mangling arguments one by one. When you observe prolific communicators in any area, it looks like what they are doing is effortless. It may be, at that particular moment. But in fact it’s years of study, internal discussions, disagreements, changing of the mind, and often finding yourself lost. AI can’t give you any of that. The thinking is done and captured in the weights of the model. It’s static. Stiff.

It wasn’t just Kennedy

Peggy Noonan (Reagan) defined her role as “trying to express the thoughts of another the way they would express them.” Ray Price (Nixon) insisted his role was “to make sure that nothing got into the President’s speech that was not what he wanted to say, the way he wanted to say it.“

Again, this is the clue. They are not writing the speech – they are building it from the ideas, phrases, and meaning conveyed by the presidents, and, importantly, leaving no personal meaning of their own in any argument.

What’s left is yours

The seductiveness of AI writing is clearly visible. It can help you with typos, grammar, structure, sentences. It will find logic errors and duplications, and push back on arguments. And this is very good – as long as you own the ideas, direct the process, maintain your voice, and take responsibility.

You don’t write because you want to say something; you write because you’ve got something to say.

— F. Scott Fitzgerald, *The Notebooks* (in *The Crack-Up*, ed. Edmund Wilson, 1945)