By Kira Logan
UC Santa Barbara English professor Sowon Park says writing done by artificial intelligence and writing done by humans have completely different motives and so are not in competition with each other.
“The goal of human writing is completely different than AI — it cannot be replaced,” Park said in a lecture last week hosted by the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center.
The event was the inaugural talk for a new IHC public affairs series called Key Passages, with a focus on historic transitions and transformation. Park specializes in cognitive literary criticism, and she serves as director of UCSB’s Center for Literature and Mind.
She told her audience that artificial intelligence may help strengthen creativity but could also come at a huge cost to originality and cognitive autonomy. She described the vastness and ability of AI as “breathtaking, mind-spinning, and quite a bit concerning.”
As her main example, Park spoke about her recent experience as head judge of a spring 2024 AI-inclusive short story competition sponsored by UCSB’s Mellichamp Initiative in Mind and Machine Intelligence.
UCSB English professor Sowon Park spoke last week on the differences between AI and human writing, launching the Key Passages lecture series hosted by the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center. Park directs UCSB’s Center for Literature and Mind.
UCSB’s Mellichamp Initiative is a cross-disciplinary effort to understand the human mind and AI’s capabilities. Park outlined the guidelines of the contest, saying there were human-only submissions, hybrid submissions, and fully AI submissions. The panel of judges ranked each submission, deciding if it had any help from AI or not.
There were 41 entries from UCSB students: 16 that were written only by humans, 4 writing submissions that were machine made, and 21 piece that were a collaboration between humans and AI. Park said that during the judging process, it was difficult to tell which submissions were human-only and which had any AI influence.
The judges quickly descended into a discussion of the “man vs. machine trope,” she said, noting that humans have a lot of fear regarding the machine taking over the human, but that the writing contest was an example of collaboration and closeness between human and machine.
During her lecture, Park invited the audience to judge for themselves, by analyzing three submissions. Participants read through prose and poetry submissions, and were asked to decide whether they were human-made or machine made.
“AI is better at standardized dialogue than most people. It’s hard to tell the difference between AI and humans [in literature],” she said, after the exercise.
Park said the AI-only pieces took the shortest amount of time to create, since only a prompt was needed. The collaborative pieces — not the human pieces — took the longest to create.
“It’s incorrect to think the use of AI saves time,” Park said.
In pointing out some of the differences between human-based writing and AI-based writing, she said one literary technique that is lost in AI-writing is allusion, which serves as a powerful tool for writers to add meaning to their work.
“In literature, what is not said and what is unsayable are just as important as what is said. AI only feeds back to us what we feed to it, and thus allusion becomes obsolete.”
By contrast, she praised AI for being particularly helpful to writers who write in languages other than English. AI can also allow anyone to “have a go” at any genre of writing they’d like.
Park sought to answer a frequently asked question in literary circles: Will AI make human writing redundant? In short, her answer is ‘No.’
“People write to make sense of things,” she said. “The need to create and make meaning through oneself is constant. AI writing can only be [considered] better if we invalidate the joy people get from writing.”
She stressed that writing connects us to ourselves, the world, and each other. To underscore the emotional connection people feel to writing, she cited a passage from Virginia Woolf’s autobiographical work “Moments of Being.”
“It is only by putting it into words that I make it whole,” Park said, quoting Woolf.
Park said that literature does not progress over time and it is not a competition. One cannot compare Woolf to Hemingway or Austen to Shakespeare — every writer’s job is to write is true for them.
“The job of a creative writer is to write about the unseen and unsaid,” Park said. “We need to remind ourselves that creative inspiration cannot be prompted.”
The act of writing, she said, is inherently human. “The whole point of writing is to make something real for you. And if other people enjoy it, then that’s great.”
Kira Logan is a third-year UC Santa Barbara student majoring in English. She is a web and social media intern for the Division of Humanities and Fine Arts.