In a recent quiz in the New York Times, readers were asked to select their preferred passage from two options. But there was a twist: one was written by AI and the other by a human, and readers didn’t know which was which. While there’s only so much context a reader can get from a few sentences, the results of the quiz—and other recent studies, too—were pretty clear: many readers do actually prefer AI writing to human writing.
Not only are generative AI models trained on countless human texts that have come before—capitalizing on very human talent—but the algorithms themselves are predictive: when putting together a sentence, they pull from the past and choose the most probable next word. The output text is smooth, familiar, and easy to read, lulling readers into a sense of security and comfort.
But when done well—and, perhaps, done humanly—writing, down to the architecture of a sentence, either does not lull or lulls by intention, only to shatter the illusion later on, a false lull. It disrupts what we thought would happen—in terms of plot, yes, but also in word choice, tone, and syntax, jolting our minds awake.
The writers we remember, the ones we quote and laud and analyze, wield the unexpected with a deft hand. Emily Dickinson, a 19th-century American poet who lived in Amherst, Massachusetts, wrote nearly 1,800 poems in her lifetime, kept in booklets she had folded and sewn together. In an act that still puzzles scholars to this day, Dickinson included annotation marks of all kinds throughout her poems. The first version of her published collection removed these marks, but today’s versions replace them with en-dashes, which they most closely resemble.
Though Dickinson’s true intention may never be known, the effect is clear enough. In one of her most famous poems, which she had left originally untitled but is now titled “‘Hope’ is the thing with feathers,” Dickinson included 15 dashes in 12 lines, often breaking up words in the same line: “‘Hope’ is the thing with feathers – / That perches in the soul – / And sings the tune without the words – / And never stops – at all –”. Each dash jolts us as we read, like we’re driving on a bumpy road, each pothole timed at the exact moment we’re supposed to pay attention. The dash after “never stops” forces us to pause. Can hope desert us?
The same effect can come from metaphor, through which Dickinson crafted many poems, taking an abstract feeling or concept and anchoring it in something very concrete. Hope is the thing with feathers perched in the soul, singing through the gale, never asking for a crumb in return. The impalpable idea of hope turns into this vivid little bird. Not most probable—but, perhaps, most inevitable—a hidden truth brought to the surface. In its freshness, the revelation disrupts our preconceptions, demanding attention. We see and feel hope in a new way; we remember the image weeks, months, years later.
And yet, why was Dickinson so compelled to write little marks into all her poems, which no poet had ever done to such a degree before? And how did Dickinson come to see hope as a bird singing through the gale?
There is one unifying answer, the simplest, albeit the grandest. Around the time she composed this poem, Dickinson wrote in a letter to her eventual editor, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, “I had a terror – since September – I could tell to none, and so I sing, as the Boy does by the Burying Ground – because I am afraid.” Dickinson was going through something, and she wrote about it to contend with it. She had a spirit; she had fears. She lived in Amherst, before radios and records, when the songs of the wrens would carry through an open window.
And meaning. Feeling. Today, the greatest disruptors. It may be obvious that AI writing will not stand the test of time, will be lost in the gale, while Dickinson’s bird keeps singing. Or, it may be obvious that engineers will tinker with AI models until the writing is no longer a probability function. But that’s not the point, really. The point is: disruption only means something when it means something. In another letter to Higginson, Dickinson wrote, “If ever you lost a friend… you remember you could not begin again because there was no world – …A breathless Death is not so cold as a Death that breathes.”
Dickinson may have been talking about a love unrequited, a severed friendship, but those lines have only deepened with time. A lifeless thing will never feel so sharply, will never mean anything as intensely, as the thing that disrupts because it is alive.
