Paul J. Griffiths (“Ghosts and Dolls,” Lent 2025) argues that the suspicion surrounding A.I.‑generated writing mirrors older prejudices about who may be seen as a “real” writer, such as the skepticism that once led the Brontë sisters and Mary Ann Evans to adopt male pseudonyms. The analogy, however, collapses under pressure. Those women had voices, experiences, feelings, sentiments, and interior lives that were denied recognition. A.I. systems, by contrast, have no interiority to suppress. By equating skepticism about a machine’s “writing” with prejudice against human writers, Griffiths flattens that crucial difference. He asks whether A.I. writing is “tainted” by its lack of a human author, weighing claims that it merely copies or cannot intend what it writes. He suggests that these distinctions unravel under scrutiny, since much of human language flows fluently and unthinkingly.
Large-language models generate language by predicting word patterns from vast text collections. They don’t read or think; they follow statistical probabilities rather than intention or understanding. If writing and meaning-making were purely a process of pattern recognition, then Griffiths’s point would hold true. But that would deny how human expression reflects experience.
Griffiths closes by arguing that A.I. writing should be read on its own terms, not dismissed outright because it comes from something without breath or blood. He asks us to look at the sentences on the page and weigh them as writing. That move reduces writing to its surface. Writing is also the act that produces it, the life and thought that shape each word. Ignoring that act mistakes the product for the thing itself. We should not hand over our capacity for meaning-making to something so cold and ruled purely by probability. Dice can’t tell a story.
Griffiths returns often to the question of intention, but he ties it closely to what he calls fluency, which he defines as the way most human language comes without deliberation. “Fluency is smooth and easy,” he writes. “Words flow for the fluent like water running downhill in a deep, smooth channel.” Intention surfaces later, when, as Griffiths puts it, “even the most fluent can answer this question”—what did you mean by that?—by “considering (itself an instance of thinking) what they did mean, and then explaining their past words.” For Griffiths, this means intention is not woven into every sentence we write. Instead, it is something we can summon when pressed, rather than the constant spark separating human writing from a machine’s output.
This is where his argument is perhaps the least persuasive. Human fluency is not proof of mindlessness, nor is it an easy process. To pick up Griffiths’s metaphor, how is such a smooth and deep channel of water created? In geological terms, the process of becoming such a river is violent and time-consuming. There is great drama in the formation of such a channel of water, and by simply seeing the channel in its present state and not considering the labor of its creation, we lose out on the hard-won necessity and value of our experiences that define fluency.
Griffiths is right to unsettle the easy divide between deliberate human composition and the patterned fluency machines produce. But by presenting intention as something that appears only when we are asked to explain ourselves, he drains it of its humanity and, in some ways, of its force and mystery—in other words, our ability to surprise one another and indeed ourselves with what we write or what we think. Human fluency rests on lived experience and meanings shaped over a lifetime. As Amos says, “Let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever‑flowing stream.” A stream rolls and reshapes the ground beneath it, and so does the long work of thought that makes fluency possible. No algorithm or probability can provide that grounding. Wittgenstein writes, “It is what human beings say that is true and false; and they agree in the language they use. That is not agreement in opinions but in form of life.” L.L.M.s do not share a form of life with us. Their language lacks the shared human practices that bind words to the lives that speak them.
Brandon Taylor
Mount Marty University
Yankton, South Dakota
