At what age did you start writing on your own? Today, people often start writing earlier and more frequently, for more reasons and in more forms. Young people quickly understand the power of writing and the need for it.
New ways of expressing oneself through writing are emerging: e-mails, tweets, emojis, mutations of rap, slam and graffiti, playing as much on calligraphy as on intelligibility, emotion, rhythm or polysemy. Usage and technical considerations also exert their influence on semantics, syntax and grammar, which are bound to evolve over time. Even machines write; if they can already take on the style we want, they'll soon be able to recognize ours among thousands.
Writing also means reading... some bloggers are followed by appreciable numbers of loyal readers, while others have virtually none at all, relegated to the dustbin of the rankings. An author's challenge has always been to be read, but today it's to compete with hundreds of millions of accessible news items and books, efficiently indexed, commented on, referred to and translated, to which we can add machine messages and massive A.I.-generated prose.
So, the idea of cyborgizing our writing with that of the A.I. is gaining ground... to be better disseminated with strategic words and key expressions compiled by algorithms and which amplify the reach of our message, altered by these considerations.... The balance between popularity, originality and ethics becomes a real issue. For an A.I., originality and coherence in both content and style will be the supreme values of the texts that serve as its inspiration; they are its nourishment, what make it seem "intelligent". Future authors will inevitably have to develop their relevance as much as the quality of their texts, while "communication agents" will above all have to increase their productivity.
Writing has not finished circulating its bits.
Denys Lamontagne - [email protected]
Illustration: peshkova - DepositPhotos
