The Intellicurean Credo
One question · Two camps · One position
On writing in collaboration with artificial intelligence
“ The machine does not write. It drafts, proposes, and retrieves — tirelessly, and with no idea which of its thousand competent sentences is the right one. That knowing is the whole of the work, and it is human.
The Position — Michael Cummins, Editor
The Argument — “It Will Write Everything”
One camp says the machines will soon do it for us — that the essay, the article, the book are becoming things one generates, the way one generates a weather report, and that the writer is a craftsman watching the loom arrive. On this view, fluency is authorship, and the human is a formality soon to be optimized away. It mistakes the draft for the deed.
The Answer — “It Is Slop, and Refusal Is Honor”
The opposing camp says any writer who touches these tools has committed a small betrayal — that the work is thereby cheapened, and the only honorable position is refusal. It is right to prize human judgment above machine fluency, but it concedes the first camp’s very premise: that the machine is the one writing. Hide the collaboration, and you have agreed it is shameful.
The Intellitake — The Third Thing
Both camps share a single hidden assumption: that the machine does the writing. It does not. It produces a thousand true and passable sentences and cannot tell which one belongs — and that knowing, which of the thousand, in this place, for this reader, to this end, is not a final polish on the work. It is the work, and it is human.
So this publication takes the third position, and states it in the open. Every essay here is made the same way: a seed idea, a structure argued over, a draft built and torn down and rebuilt, facts checked against sources because the machine will hand you a beautiful quotation no one ever said, and — again and again — the decisive human moment of looking at two good options and knowing which is true. The machine’s tasteless fluency is enormously useful, the way a great library is useful to someone who already knows what they are looking for. The lever does not lift the world; it lets someone who knows where to stand lift more than they could bare-handed. We are interested in where to stand.
We disclose it not as confession but as a standard held in public, where you can check — because the honest account is more interesting than the hidden one, and because the most hopeful thing we know about these tools is not that they will replace us, but that in the right hands, held to the right standard, they might make us more ourselves. Read the essays as the evidence. Every one carries a line at its foot: written in full collaboration with the machine. Now you know what it means — that a person with taste sat with a tool that has none, and did the human work of choosing.
Today’s Provocation
If a machine can produce a thousand competent sentences and you keep only the ten that are true — whose work is the essay?
— MICHAEL CUMMINS, EDITOR · INTELLICUREAN —