I hate generative AI with a passion I used to reserve for church-lawn sloppy joes.
Like those culinary (and, I’d argue, theological) abominations, I find the output of ChatGPT or Claude sweet, messy, and insubstantial, smears of sugar covering up dollar-store meat.
But this is not a post about my potluck traumas, nor is it about the AI-generated student essays, social media posts, and (shudder) sermons that make my skin crawl. It’s also not about the imperialist evil that AI companies brand as gutsy progress. (For that, go read Karen Ho’s Empire of AI.)
No, this is a post about what the AI prophets aim to replace, or at least cast aside like chaff: imperfect human writing.
Over the past twelve years—four working for Chimes at Calvin, then eight writing here at tpc and occasionally elsewhere—I’ve put a lot of my imperfect human writing on the internet. Sometimes I’ve been frustrated by its flaws right away; other times I’ve read an old piece I thought I liked and found it, well, sloppy. In a few lucky instances, l’d like to think, my best has also been pretty darn good. But even then, there are what-ifs and if-onlys, ghosts of better pieces I didn’t write.
Too often, these ghosts make it hard for me to write at all. Choosing each word means tossing thousands away, and there’s no way not to make a mistake in that constant stream of sieves. (See? Mixed metaphor.) I know that perfect writing is impossible, but it’s specific imperfections—awkward transitions, logical leaps—that keep me awake.
But choosing the next perfect word, then the next, then the next? That’s how AI writes, or tries to write. That’s exactly what’s not human, what turns ideas and experiments and wild risks into number-crunching. Not only is it impossible; it’s the wrong goal.
I’ve been rereading one of my favorite books, My Bright Abyss by the poet Christian Wiman. It’s a theology book by an anti-theologian, a confession of faith by someone allergic to faith. (Wiman loves these kinds of contradictions, and they’ve seeped into my sentences too.) In a section about the impossibility of separating art from life, Wiman quotes the German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer: “Every real action is of such a kind that no one other than oneself can do it.”
This may or may not be a statement about vocation; we’re going to leave that chat for the church lawn. But I think it’s also a brief against AI. If our writing is to be a “real action,” it has to be our own, motivated by our own desires and anxieties, speckled with our own lucky insights and bad habits. And by “writing,” I don’t just mean term papers and wedding vows. I mean emails, texts, obituaries, and customer complaints. I mean every chance we have to use this runaway gift called language.
I’ve also just started reading Time’s Echo by Jeremy Eichler, a book about how classical composers responded to the violence of World War II. Eichler includes an epigraph from Walter Benjamin:
True, for successful excavations a plan is needed. Yet no less indispensable is the cautious probing of the spade in the dark loam, and it is to cheat oneself of the richest prize to preserve as a record merely the inventory of one’s discoveries, and not this dark joy of the place of the finding, as well. Fruitless searching is as much a part of this as succeeding.
Bonhoeffer and Benjamin, both of whom died for their opposition to the Nazis, agreed also on this: there are no shortcuts, and even if there were, we’d be betraying ourselves to take them. Writing is painful, frustrating, and demoralizing when it feels like “fruitless searching.” But there is no other way, and that is what, to use a phrase from Wiman, we must come to praise.
I hope my colleagues here at the post calvin will not be offended when I say that I’ve been honored to share this blog with some of the most brilliantly imperfect human writers I’ve ever met. No AI could write the righteously angry, deliciously clever, piercingly moving, or endearingly oddball posts that have lit up my life for the last eight years. And even if it could, it doesn’t matter, because no AI did. You did. We did.
I hope the post calvin remains a place of dark loam and dark joy. I hope that those of us leaving will find new places to search fruitlessly, new problems to probe cautiously, new friends to help us hold the spade. I hope your church dinners are all catered by Noodles & Company, or at least Chipotle.
I know, I know, this metaphor’s broken.
Let it break.
Josh Parks graduated from Calvin in 2018 with majors in English and music, and he is currently a PhD student in religious studies at the University of Virginia. When not writing, he can be found learning the alto recorder, watching obscure Disney movies, and making excruciating puns.
