More Than Words: How to Think about Writing in the Age of AI

More Than Words: How to Think about Writing in the Age of AI by John Warner, Basic Books 

Before I started writing this review, I asked a group of close friends, “What do you think of when you think of cinnamon rolls?”

Here are some of their responses: 

“I think of sleepovers and my mom making the Pillsbury ones for me and my friends in the morning.” 

“I just think of Better Call Saul now, where he’s working incognito at a Cinnabon [...] They show them making the cinnamon buns and they look so good.” 

“No strong feelings for me, my mom would always say ‘those are horrible for you’ every time it was brought up.” 

“I think of going to the mall food court. In between rounds of Tekken [at the arcade] of course.” 

Personally, I think of the cinnamon buns temptingly waiting beyond the cash registers at IKEA and how my dad always picks up the warm ones from the counter—not the cooled ones on the shelf—for the road at the end of a shopping trip. For John Warner, author of the new book More Than Words, cinnamon rolls elicit a cascade of vivid memories: the sweet scent wafting from the Cinnabon (long since closed) in the walkway between Terminals 1 and 2 at O’Hare International Airport, the similarly intoxicating scent of beignets which evoked his years in graduate school in Louisiana, the writing professor who openly wept while reciting poetry to a class. 

ChatGPT does not have personal memories around cinnamon buns, nor does it pretend to. When asked, as of the morning of February 6, 2025, ChatGPT generated a paragraph describing what a cinnamon roll is: “When I think of cinnamon rolls, I imagine warm, soft, golden-brown pastries, swirled with sweet cinnamon filling and topped with a thick, creamy glaze or icing.” When I tried to prod it further, asking if it could come up with a specific emotion or memory around cinnamon rolls, it replied: “I can imagine that cinnamon rolls often bring up warm, nostalgic feelings.” It produced a depiction of a scene where the scent of cinnamon rolls fills the house at the crack of dawn, painting a picture that was somehow descriptive yet non-descript, tied to no particular experiences, no stories, nothing specific or real.  

Meanwhile, consider the specificity of another friend’s response, through which I could easily imagine the place and time they were recalling: 

“My cinnamon roll memory is Cinnabon in the Pembroke Lakes mall as a pit stop between my 3 favorite stores: Animation (anime store), Babbages (before GameStop bought them), and Saturday Matinee movie store (before FYE bought them). AKA the dessert after Sbarro’s.” 

In the above transaction, ChatGPT and I can’t empathize with each other. I learned something new about each of my friends when they told me about their memories around cinnamon rolls, but I got nothing of value from ChatGPT other than a strange sense of sadness and pity for this memory-less thing. “ChatGPT has no capacity to follow a flow of thought,” Warner declares. It is, simply, not human.  

Writing, Warner argues, is not a mere process of stringing words together to form a sentence, which is what large language models like ChatGPT are designed to do and what tech founders and investors are evangelizing as the bright new way of the future. Writing, fundamentally, is an expression of our humanity. Warner’s book offers many reasons to feel hopeful about the future of writing. Chief among them is that what differentiates us from AI and keeps us from being fully replaceable is our innately human ability to conjure emotions and memories and express them through writing. 

Of course, as we look ahead to a world in which artificial intelligence weaves more and more into everyday life, it’s hard not to feel dread that this rising technology could make the craft of writing obsolete. After all, most of us have encountered and interacted with AI through large language models like ChatGPT, which seem to pull paragraphs of text out of thin air in a matter of seconds. And it’s hard, even as someone who finds personal satisfaction and meaning in the act of writing, not to be tempted by the ease that AI seems to offer—why not give up the hours of mental gymnastics and let a machine do my job with just a couple of keystrokes and clicks? 

This begs the question, however: what are we avoiding when we avoid writing? What is it that we’d rather be doing with our time and energy? When we consider whether to hand over our writing tasks to machines or human beings, Warner argues that we are, in fact, making a declaration about what we value. Do we want content produced for the sake of content, something to fill up a screen, to likely be skimmed and scrolled over, to check a box on a to-do list? Or do we want to share a part of ourselves and connect meaningfully with the person who reads our work? If what we value is the latter, then outsourcing our writing to AI runs in direct contradiction to those beliefs.  

To describe it at a very basic level, artificial intelligence takes a query and sifts through seemingly endless troves of data (produced by humans, by the way), finds a pattern to follow, and comes up with the best possible compilation of what it has found in a matter of seconds. It can reformulate a response as often as we ask it to, but unlike a human being, Warner notes, AI cannot engage in self-reflection or offer its personal experiences to better prove a point. The act of writing, Warner argues, is not simply about the creation of a finished product, which is ultimately all that AI can currently offer us. The act of finding the right words to match the thoughts in our head expands us and opens us up to new possibilities of thought.  

Writing involves both the expression of an idea and the exploration of an idea—that is, when writing, you set out with an intention to say something, but as part of the attempt to capture an idea, the idea itself is altered through the thinking that happens as you consider your subject. Anyone who has written has experienced one of these mini-epiphanies that is unique to the way humans write.

When we outsource our writing to artificial intelligence, we are severing our ability to better understand ourselves. We miss out on the chance to share a part of ourselves and to connect meaningfully with others. When we take in AI-generated content, our view of the world averages out and flattens.

Engaging with creative works and stepping into someone else’s perspective stimulates and inevitably changes us. “We live our lives through a series of experiences rooted in a community of fellow humans,” Warner writes. If we are going to live alongside AI, it serves us well to keep in mind how our lives are made richer and more interesting by the recollections and creations of real, living people.