ASCI Connect

Between all this and simple reading for pleasure, I spend most waking hours looking at text on screen or the old printed form, seeking inspiration for the myriad writing tasks inherent in news production.

"Okay Boomer," I hear you say. "Why waste all that time when AI can not only provide neat summaries of everything you'd normally read, but also prepare your pitches and missives to correspondents and even your occasional pieces for the website and print editions."

The answer, of course, is that there's a lot more to reading and writing than having a machine regurgitate formulaic interpretations of other people's material. The process of writing helps you to order your thoughts and, indeed, think critically.

It also forces you to recall personal experience and consumed literature, to conjure the anecdotes, aphorisms, metaphors and axioms that give life to writing.

As The New York Times' Bret Stephens points out in a brilliant column this week: "The problem with writing with AI is that it's mentally enfeebling – an escalator towards a result when you really need to make a daily habit of taking the stairs.

"As it becomes ubiquitous, it undermines not only our individual ability to write but also a society's collective ability to reason, a culture's inner capacity to create and everyone's reason to care."

Anyone quick to dismiss this as a sort of 21st Century Luddism should have a look at a sample of university essays from the past few years.

Even while adhering to rules on how AI can be employed – research, referencing, translations and so on – students are producing some of the flattest, driest personality-free prose ever committed to paper. I would know – I have a side hustle marking some of them.

Without properly reading or thinking about the given topic, or assembling their own thoughts on it, students are missing out on the real joy of learning and being able to articulate exactly what they've learnt.

We are entering the post-literary age and should be afraid.