ARTICLE · 1124742
AI 写作,究竟少了什么?| 经济学人
01 文章选材
September 26TH‑October 2ND ｜Britain
【Para. 1】AI 写作无处不在，但质量仍有待提升
【Para. 2】人们掀起识别 AI 文本热潮
【Para. 3】AI 生成文字有明显标志，引发人类智力担忧
【Para. 4】AI 技术对英语语言影响无从预估
【Para. 5】英语文学史表明，人类作家也有低质量的作品
【Para. 6】AI 部分作品在文字速度、内容质量与吸引力更优
【Para. 7】写作不仅倾泻文字，更包含思考的过程
【Para. 8】写作更关于世界认知与自我认识，是利用 AI 写作缺失的重要部分
【Para. 9】人们接受 AI 处理实际任务，但反感其取代情感表达与责任担当
【Para. 10】AI 写作仿造人类写作，但缺乏人文特征，产生恐怖效应
【Para. 11】AI 写作即使优秀，但人更爱阅读人类作品
1142 words ★★★★☆（难度评级）
AI often makes writing worse. (Even if it makes it better)
【Para. 1】Writing using artificial intelligence is everywhere. It has crept into elite newspapers (the Wall Street Journal ran an op‑ed drafted by it) and elite publishing houses (Grasset in France finds itself defending a star author accused—falsely, he claims—of using it in a prize‑winning novel). It is in the speeches of British politicians (see previous story), in the homework of British students and abundantly there in LinkedIn posts (41% of longer ones, according to a study by Pangram, a detector, use it). Ask Gmail to draft a love letter to your partner and it will instantly offer up “My Dearest [Husband’s Name]…”. It is quick. It is not quite Keats.
【Para. 2】Who cares? The reactions show that people do care. AI‑spotting has become a mania. Prose is being scrutinised with the attention, and jargon, once reserved for Latin literature. Arcane rhetorical terms like antithesis and epanorthosis (the “not X, but Y” construction) and tricolon (threefold things, like “veni, vidi, vici”) are bandied about by social‑media users with the verve of Ciceronian scholars. Literary criticism has rarely been so hot.
【Para. 3】The em‑dash, the most notorious AI “tell”, seems to be acting as—another rhetorical word—a synecdoche, the term for when writers use a part for the whole, like “wheels” for “car” or, perhaps, “em‑dash” for “the intellectual obsolescence of the human race”. This, says Maryanne Wolf, an emeritus professor of neuroscience at UCLA, is not a battle over punctuation. It is a “battle for our minds”.
【Para. 4】AI is so “unprecedented”, says Steven Pinker, a professor at Harvard, that we cannot tell how, or whether, it will affect the English language. Happily there is a body of evidence dating back a few years (about 1,300) on what good writing is. It is called “English literature”.
【Para. 5】The first thing that a millennium of English writing shows is that most people are terrible at it. They find it painful to do (“like a long bout of some painful illness”, as George Orwell had it) and produce words that are almost as painful to read. AI can be bad; humans are often worse. Dan Brown offered: “His eyes went white, like a shark about to attack.” William Wordsworth offered an ode to a spade (it began “Spade!”). Lee Child offered the phrase: “It was about as distinctive as the most distinctive thing you could ever think of.”
【Para. 6】By contrast, AI writes with the ease of the easiest thing you could ever think of. It can write a sonnet in half a second, a 1,000‑word article in ten seconds, an Austen‑length novel in half an hour. And though it can be bad, it often isn’t. In a recent blind tasting of two short stories, one human‑written and one AI‑written, researchers from the University of Villanova found that respondents rated the AI story as “higher quality and more absorbing”.
【Para. 7】Yet English literature also shows that writing is not just the act of spewing words onto a page. Writing, as writers point out, is no more merely words on the page than a smile is joy, or a tear is sorrow. Real writing is not writing at all. It is thinking; specifically it is thinking: “What do I think?”
【Para. 8】Often “you only really know what you think by writing it,” says Emma Smith, a professor of English at Oxford. For how, as a character quoted by E.M. Forster puts it, “can I tell what I think till I see what I say?” When Michael Gove, the editor of the Spectator and an ex‑MP, was in the cabinet he told his underlings to “Think in ink.” To make a good argument you need to have followed its logic “step by step”—in writing. Those who use AI to write speeches are, he says, using “counterfeit currency”.
【Para. 9】But counterfeit currency is always disliked; AI writing is not. Few would object to someone using AI to contest a parking fine, fill in a tax return or for a second‑language speaker to polish their English. If a company uses AI to announce a new parking policy, few care. But, says Colleen Kirk, a professor at the New York Institute of Technology, if that policy was problematic and the company apologised using AI—then “You’ve got a big problem.” You risk activating “moral disgust”.
【Para. 10】In 1970 a Japanese robotics expert, Mori Masahiro, noted that the more human a robot looks, the more affinity humans feel for it—until it becomes too human, whereupon affinity turns to revulsion: the “uncanny valley”. If you shook someone’s hand in a darkened room and, unexpectedly, clasped a prosthetic hand you would, Mori wrote, “shriek”. AI writing—bland, plasticky, human‑ish—seems to sit in the “uncanny valley” of prose. It certainly makes social media shriek.
【Para. 11】So here is the AI paradox. AI prose is easier to produce and often better than human prose. Yet humans do not like it; they may impair their ability by using it and they often loathe its use by others. This may be ridiculous but is encouraging. As humanity destroys its intellectual dominion with its own intellect—as it is beaten back in chess, in Go, in coding—we retain one last advantage: we are human. And, for now, humans (often) prefer to read humans. So make the most of that and, as E.M. Forster also said, “Only connect”. And probably write personal emails yourself. Especially to your “[Dearest Husband]”.
05 检验题
21. According to Paragraphs 1 and 2, AI-assisted writing _____.
[A] is confined to student homework and politicians' speeches
[B] has improved LinkedIn posts by 41% in reader approval
[C] ended debates about Latin rhetoric and literary criticism
[D] appears across elite and everyday settings, drawing intense public inspection
22. The author mentions Orwell, Dan Brown, Wordsworth and Lee Child in Paragraph 5 in order to _____.
[A] prove that human writers have lost the ability to write original stories
[B] show that human prose can be poor even while AI attracts criticism
[C] suggest that famous authors should stop relying on traditional literature
[D] argue that AI detectors cannot distinguish fiction from ordinary writing
23. Michael Gove's remarks in Paragraph 8 suggest that speechwriting with AI _____.
[A] reduces cost but preserves the writer's step-by-step reasoning
[B] helps politicians translate public opinion into clearer arguments
[C] bypasses the process through which people work out their thoughts
[D] should be acceptable when speakers later revise the machine's draft
24. It can be inferred from Paragraphs 9 and 10 that AI writing is most troubling when _____.
[A] it is used to complete routine forms quickly
[B] it replaces a human voice in ethically charged communication
[C] its style becomes so polished that readers suspect plagiarism
[D] it produces longer sentences than most human authors can write
25. Which of the following would be the best title for the text?
[A] Artificial Words, Human Unease
[B] How Detectors Expose Bad AI
[C] A History of Machine Translation
[D] Why Robots Should Replace Novelists
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