Is AI Really 'Writing'? From a Priestess to Philosophers, Ancient Authors Would Have Said No

The Soul in the Machine: Why Ancient Philosophy Rejects the Term "AI Writing"

In the modern era, "writing" is often reduced to the mechanical act of placing legible symbols on a page or screen. Under this narrow definition, Large Language Models like ChatGPT are arguably the most prolific writers in history. However, if we examine the origins of the craft through the lens of history's first authors and philosophers, a profound discrepancy emerges.

From the temple hymns of Mesopotamia to the academies of Athens, writing was never viewed as mere data transmission. It was an act of agency, emotion, and transformation. By these ancient standards, AI does not "write" - it merely "generwrites."

1. Enheduanna and the "Living Medium"

Enheduanna (circa 2,300 BCE), the Akkadian high priestess and world's first recorded author, provides the earliest blueprint for what writing is meant to achieve. In her masterpiece, The Exaltation of Inanna, writing is portrayed as a tool for altering destiny.

Writing as Social and Divine Intervention

For Enheduanna, writing was not a summary of facts. It was a strategic plea. The emotional core of her work emerged from the visceral experience of exile and suffering. AI lacks the biological and psychological capacity for suffering, rendering its praise or pleading a hollow simulation.

The transformative effect of her writing was equally significant. Enheduanna used text to merge two distinct deities - Inanna and Ishtar - effectively unifying an empire through narrative.

In the Akkadian tradition, writing was a living medium. It interacted with the gods and the political landscape to change the future. AI, by contrast, operates in a closed loop of probability, reacting to the past through training data rather than consciously attempting to shape a new reality.

2. The Platonic Critique: From Thought to Symbol

Two millennia later, Plato and Aristotle formalised the relationship between the mind and the written word. Their definitions create an insurmountable barrier for non-conscious entities.

The Hierarchy of Expression

In the Phaedrus, Plato defines a specific hierarchy of truth: Knowledge and truth sit at the top as ultimate reality. Thoughts are the mental apprehension of that truth. Speech is the immediate symbol of those thoughts. Writing is a poor copy of speech.

Aristotle mirrored this in De Interpretatione, stating that written words are symbols of spoken words, which are themselves symbols of mental experience.

The AI paradox follows directly from this framework. Because an AI lacks mental experience, its output is a symbol of a symbol that refers to nothing. It is a copy of a human voice without the thought that Plato deemed necessary for the pursuit of truth.

3. Aristotle and the "Moving of Souls"

In his treatise Rhetoric, Aristotle defines the craft not as the exchange of information, but as the art of moving souls - psychagogia.

The Blandification of Synthetic Text

While AI can be persuasive through sheer volume or stylistic mimicry, it struggles with the Aristotelian pillars of Ethos - credibility derived from character - and Pathos - emotional appeal derived from shared human experience.

Recent research indicates a pro-human attribution bias. When readers discover a text is synthetic, its ability to move the soul diminishes. This is because writing is a social contract: a connection between two embodied beings.

Computer science professor Natasha Jaques has noted a blandification in AI-generated text. By prioritising the most probable next word, AI strips away the idiosyncratic voice that makes human writing dynamic and transformative.

4. Defining the Future: From Writing to "Generwriting"

If AI output lacks the intention of Enheduanna and the mental experience required by Plato, what should we call it?

The term "generwriting" is proposed to distinguish synthetic text generation from human authorship.

Writing is an embodied, thinking process aimed at transformation and the moving of souls.

Generwriting is an algorithmic aggregation of data designed to simulate communication without internal experience.

The distinction matters. Writing originates from embodied experience and thought. Its goal is soul-moving and transformation. Its mechanism is intentional agency. Generwriting originates from data aggregation and probability. Its goal is information transmission and utility. Its mechanism is statistical prediction.

Conclusion: The Persistence of the Human Spirit

As AI becomes a ubiquitous fixture in the classroom and the workplace, the ancient authors remind us that the essence of writing is not found in the output, but in the intent.

Writing is an act of will. It is a priestess reclaiming her post. It is a philosopher seeking the Good. It is a student struggling to find their own voice. While machines can generate content, the sacred act of writing - the striving of one soul to move another - remains a uniquely human frontier.