Writing for Writing's Sake

It's been over 3 months since I last wrote a post on this blog. 3 months during which I've been busy getting myself acquainted with AI. I have to admit that I am not on the cutting edge. But I have succeeded in shifting my mindset from "Ooh, let me test this new approach!" to "Ooh, let me see if AI can do this for me!" Because the rate at which AI is evolving is exponential. Right now, it can do many of the things I used to pride myself on far better than I can, with little guidance.

But this post is not meant to be about AI. It is supposed to be about writing. I have chosen to write about writing because writing is what I've been kinda doing, yet precisely missing for the last 3 months. Just not here.

You see, I live at the intersection of Writing, Coding, and Data. The first is a hobby which I have grown into a craft. The second is an education which has become my profession. And the last is a keen interest which I discovered through my work.

Perhaps it is because I live here that I feel a need to write about writing. I also feel I ought to have an opinion on AI, which is why it keeps cropping up. But as a denizen of the 3 worlds, I have found that writing lies at the core of them all.

I once described programming as writing in "The Language of Logic." Data Analysis, I would like to presume, is seeing the Reason of Logic, and maybe one day I will write an article about that. But for today, I want to articulate why writing has become the mainstay of these new fields.

It is simply because writing is a means of communication, and one that (thanks to programming languages) both humans and machines can understand. Now, data is information, and with the internet, which connects computers around the world, that information can be transmitted internationally.

The two together, writing and the internet, gave birth to the information age. A world where everyone with access to a phone, tablet, or computer could communicate information digitally with any other person on the planet. Over time, the internet became home to all types of information from all over the world. It even grew to house non-written forms of data, but at its core remained a home for written information.

Now, AI has come to leverage that immense amount of information for its users' objectives. A few weeks ago, I read a Medium Blog post about writing in the age of AI. It was titled "Why writing still wins in the AI era," and it was my inspiration to write this post. Because, as a writer, I kinda agree with the views expressed in that post. But more importantly, I am sold on the value of writing for its own sake.

As AI matures and becomes capable of doing all our jobs, the need to manually generate original pieces of written content will start to disappear. The same way the need to manually generate code is. But unlike coding, where the value delivered is the application you build, writing delivers value in the doing as well as completing of it.

I write to record the past, process the present, and create artefacts for the future. Writing helps me think, reflect, and share my experiences. This blog, for instance, is not just where I come to talk to you, my audience. It is also a portfolio of the types of things I like to write about for no money. If you take some time to browse it, you will no doubt get a picture of the type of person I am, just from my writings.

It is because writing has this quality of being a communique that it has inherent value. Writing is both a verb and a noun for good reason. Unlike speech, which easily comes out without forethought, writing imposes structure around our thoughts. It demands that what we are saying on paper makes sense to us first, and because it does, it reduces the chances of misyarning.

Of course, that is not to say that people do not still misyarn on paper, but at least, you can be sure that what they wrote made sense to them, even if it doesn't to you. But more importantly, writing preserves itself, can be edited, and may live for as long as the medium does. All of these are benefits that AI is reaping today.

Having learned from the communications of millions of people across the internet, AI can give us insightful results. Which brings us back to how I started this article, and all the writing I was doing off the blog while getting acquainted with AI. Because, for right now, communicating with AI is mostly done in writing via prompts. And while there's a whole discipline developing around how to write the most effective prompts, called prompt engineering, the real question it's asking is: how do we write better?

How do we write better?

How do we ask for what we want better? How do we express ourselves more effectively? How do we let our AI agents know what we want from them precisely? These are not technology questions. They are communication questions. The type of questions writers ask themselves daily. Now the whole world is asking them.

Everybody currently engaging with AI is learning to become a better writer. Because writing has once again become a doorway to something better. Reading and Writing have been the keys to knowledge for a long time. Now, they are also the keys to AI.