AI Must Not Steal the Joy of Writing

For those who, like me, can neither hold a brush nor frame a photograph, writing has always been the ultimate tool: a gesture at once constructed and liberating.

There is a magic — almost physical — in watching a fuzzy thought grow precise under your fingers, sentence by sentence, until the words, black on white, become the exact echo of what you were carrying inside.

The awkwardness remains, of course. But it is between the commas, the periods, and the parentheses that something irreplaceable slips in: the trace of an intention, of a conviction, of a choice.

Even light-years from the great authors, there is a kind of felicity in passing on to the reader a little of that hard-won clarity.

But here is the paradox of the generative era:

Where digital let us test variations around an idea, AI places us at a crossroads. Two paths lie open:

• The gentle slope: that of a leveling down, where we would trade creation for the illusion of inspiration, and where words would become impersonal and interchangeable.

• The ridge: the path on which AI, far from being a crutch, becomes a teammate in giving body to ideas that are bolder, more precise, more singular.

As the sociologist Manuel Cervera-Marzal points out in a recent column in Le Monde: "AI must not be a pretext for giving up on writing. It can become a catalyst for it — on the condition that we learn to use it with judgment."

That is the real challenge.

Generative AI is neither an end, nor the end of the written word. It is a means — a demanding one. A means that forces us to clarify what we want to say, to sharpen our voice, to own our stances.

In lecture halls as in open-plan offices, the question can no longer be "Can AI write?" It has to be "What do we want to write that AI could not carry in our place?"