My ability to write this at all, such as it is, is not thanks to AI. It is the fruit of years and decades of turning up, figuring out and learning, mostly in areas of deep discomfort.
Like many people with Dyslexia, when I begin writing an article or an academic essay, all my ideas get chaotically bunched up in the opening paragraph – all the words are there, but I have had to learn to string them out into a pace that makes sense for other readers as well as myself.
When I was a child and a teenager, Dyslexia obviously existed, but certainly not in my schools. I was a bright child who later had to learn to mask confusion – I couldn’t understand why I couldn’t just learn some things – certain vocabulary, concepts in maths and music theory. It was only much later, when I returned to university as a mature student after crashing and burning first time around, that the Dyslexia penny dropped. What a revelation for me, and all those gaps, workarounds, and areas of mixed wiring began to be possibilities. The power of an assessment and diagnosis is that you stop thinking there’s something intrinsically wrong with you. Perhaps neurodiversity is like having a left-handed brain in a right-handed world – you’re free to devise your own methods.
My Dyslexia was also quite difficult to pick up because I was a very early reader and writer – at times voraciously so. Yes, I can still get stuck on the same paragraph, and fixated by something like a misprint, classic Dyslexia experiences, but I’ve always rather enjoyed those liminal states in my mind – they’re almost like the waking dream state I like to get into when I’m writing poetry.
I pushed myself so much into these areas of discomfort – academic essays, etc, that I ended up with a degree and two masters. I had a drive to get to the other side, to get through the difficult and uncomfortable bits in order to become somewhat fluent in the subject. Sometimes it really wasn’t pretty – getting through master’s level statistics for psychology took all of my brain juice, but in other ways, I learned to like what had been so difficult. I learned to structure academic essays, and in time was able to tutor other Dyslexic students in such academic skills. Summarising, which had been an area of impossibility for me at school, has become something I have in my gift, honed from years of book and exhibition reviews.
I have therefore, at times through finding new and inventive ways peculiar to myself, and at other times through sheer bloody-minded learning, forged new neural pathways, pathways that I prize, and that somewhat define me. Some are hard won, some are instinct, some due to revelation. Who’s to say? But they are mine.
Along the way in my writing quest, technology has of course played its part. Computing and word processing save time and keep things neat. Spell check is a boon.
Writing is an effort. It’s an effort for me to think about what I want to say in this, and to trust that the words and concepts will occur to me in more or less the right order. I have certain hopes and beliefs in my internal editing methods. But above all, I have faith in my writing process, that I cast my intention forth, that I reach for the space where I sense thought and feeling collide, and that it will occur to me in a form I can access and translate into writing. Sometimes it can be difficult, frustrating and uncomfortable, and sometimes it can be fluid, joyous and profound. Like poetry.
My social media feeds seem to half-full of adverts offering me programmes to throw a few of my ideas together and become an instant expert with a best-selling book – no effort! AI will do all the difficult bits! What, without the pleasure and work, the inspiration and expansion of labouring on a book myself? We do know, don’t we, that writing is not just about words. It’s quite a mystical process when we stop to think about it, creating form from concepts, feelings, the nebulous human area, the infinite internal.
Why would I delegate that process to AI? I feel it would be like crack cocaine once tasted (not that I’ve ever indulged in that). I feel the danger of AI creep into the very prized, mysterious, human process of writing. I can only speak for myself, but my writing comes from the most human part of me – the striving, the emotional, the feeling in the dark, the Dyslexic. I access the gap where there are no words, and words appear. All else is learned.
Are we at the brink of delegating our writing, our thinking, poetry to AI? In the 1960s there were some interesting experiments in constructing poetry by mechanical means. Throw a bunch of words in the air and the human will find meaning in the landed arrangement. It’s a human characteristic to find meaning. Even newborn babies’ attention will gravitate towards two dots that look like a face.
It's fascinating to see chess players play against computers. How marvellous that computing can become so complex, so multi-layered as to master a game of strategy, and how amazing that it could outplay a human. But would we really want to watch two chess computers play against each other, without the wonder of the humanity, and all the distractions, emotions, intellect, understanding and patterning that we can somewhat relate to? That’s it, chess solved, no point in learning. Mastery of chess is about so much more than intellect. AI can fill in your crossword puzzle, so why bother with the challenge of working things out?
Do we want to get our meaning from stitched-together words generated from AI without a human somewhere mastering, striving, feeling their way, having inspiration land at last?
And as for fiction and poetry. Would you ever want to read something written by AI, to take it into your heart? I’m sure it could write something splendid about this beautiful autumn day today, with the golden sun sparkling, making everything seem hyper-real, or would that be the sun is revealing the deeper reality revealed by autumn, of life and the beauty of change? Bung a few of those concepts into Chat GPT and I’m sure it would come up with something coherent, even lyrical. I may be slightly interested in reading that, once, as an experiment, but there’s that crack cocaine, the addictive, sugary, meaning-lite fix to which I would ascribe some meaning. The truth is, such a poem has no soul. It’s not born from the years, decades, generations of culture and evolution. It’s surface, and the opposite of profound, whatever that is.
Perhaps it is Luddite to resist change. The Luddites have had a poor reputation as laggards, backwards dunces who fought inevitable progress. Today they are more recognised as people who resisted the soulless mechanisation of labour, and the degradation of humanity as mere cogs in the wheels of progress. They weren’t completely wrong, were they, when we consider the countless thousands who were trampled in factories and mines during the Industrial Revolution. How soon after came the Arts and Crafts movement which valued the human touch in artefacts and the cultural legacy of craft, only this time as a more moneyed and privileged pursuit.
I’m sure if it is well used, AI can be a fabulous word processing tool. If you find it useful for writing applications, emails, whatever, then great for you, and I’m also grateful to you for forging the human/AI interface, hopefully somewhere positive. I’m resisting. I’m holding onto writing from my human, Dyslexic mind.
I’m reminded of Mrs Doyle from Father Ted when she’s given the hated teamaking machine which is to unburden her from the misery of being on constant tea-making duty. ‘Maybe I like the misery’ she says, stabbing the machine with a screwdriver. Perhaps I like the discomfort of writing. Perhaps I am so used to the toil and effort that I know no other way to reap the reward of crafting meaning in words. Perhaps my neural pathways like the striving, the creating. I know I do.
Eleanor MacFarlane, not AI, October 2025
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