Book Review: More Than Words by John Warner

This week's review is on More Than Words: How to Think About Writing in the Age of AI by John Warner.

The biggest problem with AI and education is that our system is geared not towards a deeper purpose but instead towards some promise of college and career advancement. The cleverest students realize this and play the system (completion grades, extra credit, clubs, et al.) in order to succeed; but little learning happens in this context. No better demonstration of this than the former gameshow, "Are You Smarter than a Fifth Grader?" The facts and skills required for fifth grade have no deeper context than as fodder for report cards to show advancement and credentialing for future admission officers and hiring firms.

John Warner, columnist and professor, drives right at this point in his newest book - but one that is really a continuation and resettling of his earlier text, Why They Can't Write: Killing the Five-Paragraph Essay and Other Necessities. The absurdity of writing to a formula is deeply highlighted when that text is predicted according to that same formula and spits out even more soulless content by ChatGPT, Gemini, and their cohort of LLMs. Did it need to be a book though?

Good cover!

Books provide the opportunity to settle in deeply with a topic, grapple with it, and explore the inside of an author's mind in a deeper sense. Blog posts are the missives of this age - short and sustainable interactions that can be linked but ultimately provide a window, rather than entrance. I'm not sure if a book-length treatment of the topic and Warner's thoughts is warranted, even with my wholehearted endorsement of his argument and 75 highlights in this relatively short work.

Warner divides the book into four parts of several short chapters each. Part One introduces AI and provides background. Part Two focuses on introducing writing, what it is and what it is not; and the contrast with what LLMs produce and what humans can produce: "ChatGPT could produce grammatically and syntactically correct English, something most students—something most people—struggle to do on demand" (Location 184). This "intelligence illusion" is key to his argument - that what LLMs do and what humans do are not equivalent.

Part Three brings these two together as he presents his case within a historical, societal, and personal context. "Lots of the writing students produce in school contexts is untethered from ideas" (913) and as such we must fight, as educators, for writing that is "purposeful, varied, and fun" (1409). Of course, this is echoed in the educational approach to reading: "Deep reading is largely absent from the student reading diet because it is harder to assess against the standards that have come to dominate the curriculum" (1655).

Warner contextualizes the rapid adoption of AI to earlier efforts which struggled to (1) identify an actual problem, (2) provide an actual solution, and (3) make effort. As Thomas Edison said in 1922: "I believe that the motion picture is destined to revolutionize our educational system, and that in a few years it will supplant largely, if not entirely, the use of textbooks" (1807). Ultimately, Warner highlights the absurdity present here, promoting an image of the necessity and capability of teachers (1920):

The engineering model is favored by those who are in the business of selling teaching machines because it is an approach that machines can accomplish. But students are not products, and teaching is far more sophisticated than what can be achieved under the engineering model. The people who believe in teaching machines rarely evince any real understanding of what it means to teach and to learn.

Part Four wraps up with a "framework for action: resist, renew, explore." In short this means:

1. Resist - those areas where "we humans to maintain our autonomy in our relationship with the alien intelligence" (3035).

2. Renew - those areas which are "true regardless of the presence or absence of artificial intelligence" (3038).

3. Explore - those areas where "generative AI can enhance our lives" (3043).

The broader context is asking questions, echoing Bender (492):

What is being automated? Who is automating it and why? Who benefits from that automation? How well does the automation work in its use case that we’re considering? Who is being harmed? Who has accountability for the functioning of the automated system? What existing regulations already apply to the activities where the automation is being used?

Warner's attack on the current system highlights that "writing as a process through which you come to know your own mind in the context of the existing set of knowledge available to us all" (245) and allows us to conflate worth with job and labor, a mistake in a generative AI world (3214). As such, "If ChatGPT can do something, then that thing probably doesn’t need to be done by a human being. It quite possibly doesn’t need to be done period" (254). We are called (3492):

In my view, the goal is to create ourselves as individuals through acts of personal discernment. To practice our taste and express our values. We bring these individual selves into communities of other individuals who have their own unique worldviews. Here, then, is an ecosystem of interdependent individuals, a collection of intelligences existing without being flattened into an algorithm.

Warner comes close to endorsing a near-religious worldview that acknowledges a deeper conception of the person, but fails to do so; trusting on a sense of human nostalgia and logical argument that points towards the deeper truth without pursuing it. As such, the book-length treatment of what writing is and what generative text is not and how we should handle it falls flat and shallow. A truth framework not only acknowledges the difference; but roots it in philosophical and theological truths and the broader conception of the deepest aspects of intellectual debate from throughout history; not liberalism's desire to promote the individual and their "truth." This avoidance of something deeper weakens the final part and to some extent the under-girding of the previous three chapters - even with the wealth of truth and insights across its pages.

More Than Words: How to Think About Writing in the Age of AI by John Warner.

Rating: 4/5 Stars

Good For: Writers and writing teachers who want a more philosophical consideration of their craft and the educational nature of it as it relates to AI.

Best nugget: There's a word for those piles of books waiting to be read! Tsundoku.

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