Writing, one of humanity’s oldest crafts, now stands at a defining crossroads. What once relied on pen, paper, and the solitary workings of the mind is now being reshaped by the unrelenting march of technology, particularly Artificial Intelligence. The core tenets of compelling narrative and profound description remain intact, but the instruments and landscapes of creation are undergoing rapid and fundamental change.
This piece weaves together insights from Pulitzer Prize-winning authors Paul Harding and Richard Powers, linguistic authority Steven Pinker, and a close examination of Microsoft’s evolving role in the AI space. Together, these voices illuminate the dynamic interplay between human creativity and technological innovation, shedding light on what is at stake and where meaning might still be found.
At its heart, great writing remains a profoundly human act. Harding and Powers exemplify this. Their craft is not defined by plot mechanics or commercial trends but by a deep engagement with the world through sensation, observation, and the slow, often difficult work of making meaning. What separates their work is not technical mastery alone, but a moral and emotional fidelity to experience itself.
Paul Harding compares writing to jazz, a form of improvisation and intuition, where structure follows feeling rather than leading it. He openly declares his indifference to plot and only a measured interest in character. What animates his prose is the desire to capture “the wonders and the mysteries of life,” to render raw sensation and transform it into literary form. For Harding, the act of writing begins with the act of seeing. He implores writers to slow down, avoid the safety of familiar phrases, and return to what he calls a pre-linguistic state of perception. This is an attempt to see the world as if for the first time. To shed assumption and allow meaning to emerge naturally.
This approach, he insists, requires a leap of faith. One must trust that the material, when observed with patience and honesty, will offer its own truths. In his acclaimed novel Tinkers, Harding presents a crack in a ceiling that slowly expands to reveal the cosmos. This is not metaphor layered over description; it is metaphor born out of it. Such moments reflect his commitment to language that arises directly from perception.
Richard Powers, while giving greater weight to character, also approaches fiction as a process of discovery. For him, character is not a bundle of traits, but a gradually revealed set of values. A character’s essence is not what they do but what they believe in and how they respond when beliefs collide. Powers argues that the real drama emerges not from action, but from ethical friction. The critical moment comes when a character must choose between two competing values, and it is in that decision that the story truly lives.
He identifies three primary forms of dramatic tension. The first is internal conflict, where an individual faces a moral or emotional impasse. The second is interpersonal conflict, typically shaped by opposing goals or temperaments. The third, often neglected, is the metaphysical or environmental conflict: the individual’s relationship with nature, the cosmos, or the conditions of existence itself. In recent years, Powers suggests, this third form is resurging, particularly in the context of environmental degradation and climate crisis.
In The Overstory, Powers restores narrative presence to trees and forests. He does not present nature as mere background, but as an active force, a consciousness worthy of attention and respect. This blending of scientific understanding and spiritual insight attempts to reorient our place within the web of life. Powers proposes that literature can be a vehicle for ecological awareness, a way to draw readers into a more intimate relationship with the planet.
For both Harding and Powers, description is not ornamental. It is structural. It is how narrative becomes immersive. It enables the transmission of subtle ideas with emotional weight. It carries feeling into thought. When description is handled with precision, it becomes the architecture of understanding.
Precision itself is sacred. Harding speaks of aiming for “maximum density with maximum readability”. Each word must justify its inclusion. He rejects decorative language unless it serves the integrity of the sentence. His is a pared-back clarity that has been worked and reworked until only the essential remains.
Steven Pinker shares this devotion to linguistic economy. He warns against what he calls the “curse of knowledge” – the tendency of experts to write as though their readers possess the same background and familiarity with a subject. The result is prose that is opaque, abstract, and disengaged. Pinker advocates for concrete, visual language, pointing out that earlier writers were often more vivid because they drew on familiar imagery and metaphor.
The goal of writing, Pinker reminds us, is not simply to communicate information but to offer an experience. It should help readers build a mental model, a scene they can visualise and inhabit. This aligns with Harding’s conviction that language should not obscure reality but reveal it.
The process of writing, in their view, is not linear. Harding admits to writing a thousand pages to discover the one hundred and fifty worth keeping. Revision, for him, is not an afterthought but a means of distilling truth. Powers regards revision not as correction but as continued discovery. The manuscript is always provisional, always evolving. This continual return to the work is not a flaw, but a hallmark of seriousness. It reflects the human struggle to get language right, to make it worthy of what it tries to describe.
Machines, by contrast, do not struggle. Their sentences are not wrestled into shape. They do not suffer the indignity of uncertainty or the humility of failure. Their outputs are not the result of consciousness grappling with itself.
And yet, Artificial Intelligence has arrived. The writing world is now encountering the full implications of large language models. Steven Pinker, who has followed developments in AI since the 1980s, has a tempered view. He finds that the text produced by AI is grammatically sound and free of obvious errors, but also flat and lifeless. He describes it as syntactically proficient but emotionally inert. According to him, this is the outcome of reinforcement learning shaped by human preferences. AI has learned to produce the safest possible sentence.
This phenomenon gives rise to a pressing question. In an era where machines can produce competent text, what makes human writing essential?
The answer lies not only in creativity but in presence. AI is already contributing to as much as half the code written in some sectors. Satya Nadella believes this will drive productivity and generate new jobs, echoing the familiar optimism of past technological revolutions. But not all share this view. Mustafa Suleyman, now leading Microsoft’s consumer AI strategy, has declared that the era of exclusive human dominance will come to an end within a decade.
This prediction has profound implications. What happens to work when machines can think? What becomes of learning, judgment, and authorship? Suleyman describes AI as both an extraordinary instrument and a dangerous force. It can be used to heal or to harm, to enlighten or to control. Its presence in security, surveillance, and warfare is already a source of concern.
What grows more valuable in this context is the human fingerprint in writing. Harding insists that a writer’s brain functions like a fingerprint: singular, inimitable, and specific. Authentic voice is not cobbled together from data. It is the product of a mind responding to the world in real time, with all the nuance and contradiction that entails.
Language models generate text by recombining the past. They are limited to what has already been said. They do not feel, they do not intend, and they do not revise with conscience. Harding and Powers revise because they are trying to say something that is true, not merely something that sounds plausible. They are engaged in a moral and intellectual pursuit.
Harding also sees writing as a form of generosity. The best books offer meaning without exhausting it. They leave space for the reader to participate. Each return to the text reveals something new because the reader has changed. This is why classics such as Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance or Moby-Dick endure. They do not impose their messages. They invite exploration. In contrast, poor writing declares everything up front. It closes the door. Great writing leaves it ajar.
When writing succeeds, it does more than inform. It recognises the reader. It says, “You are not alone.” When we encounter a phrase or scene that reflects our own inner life, we are momentarily affirmed. “I have felt that. I have endured that. I have hoped that.” The personal becomes universal, and the act of reading becomes transformative.
In an age of speed and distraction, Harding’s call to slow down is a radical proposition. It is not simply an aesthetic choice. It is a philosophical stance. Slowness enables attention. It deepens perception. It allows the mind to notice what would otherwise pass unseen. In writing, as in life, slowing down creates the possibility of depth.
Artificial Intelligence urges us to go faster. That is its promise and its peril. In optimising for output, it risks reducing the range and resonance of human expression. The question is not whether AI can write. It already does. The question is whether it can mean.
This is why human writing is more important than ever. The future will not be defined by conflict between people and machines, but by the quality of their collaboration. Let AI handle the generic. Let human beings pursue what is intricate, messy, and essential.
The real challenge is not to outperform AI on its terms, but to remain faithful to our own. The writer’s task is to go where machines cannot follow: into ambiguity, into memory, into conscience.
That is the enduring labour. That is what makes writing an act of resistance, of presence, and of care. It still matters. It always will.