The Grain of Thought"> Skip to essay Over the past year:<br>I have read more words generated by LLMs than written by humans.<br>I have written more words for LLMs than for humans.<br>And most of the work-related words I have written for humans have been LLM-mediated, passing under the editorial eyes of an LLM before reaching their recipients.

A truth I once assumed — “reading is how I consume writing” — has worn away, leaving something looser: “reading is how I consume text.” I no longer presuppose a thinking, feeling writer behind text.1 1 Some conceptual housekeeping: I realise this could be read as crudely smuggling in the argument that only people can write. Without opening an ontological can of worms, I think writing can be productively interpreted as one type of text production, characterised by the attempt to convey one’s thoughts. Other forms of text production might include transcription (by human or non-human scribes) and generation (by machines). So you’ll see me describe humans as writing and LLMs as generating.<br>Peter Steiner’s New Yorker comic, “On the internet, nobody knows you’re a dog,” comes to mind. Just replace the dog with a data centre.<br>This made me sad. Despite what my neglected reading habit might suggest, I am a writer’s son and a humanist before a technologist. One story I tell myself is that I value reading as an empathetic exercise, an opportunity for proximity with another’s mind as articulated through their writing. A nice, even romantic idea. And yet, there I was. A year of revealed preference undermining it, and I hadn’t even noticed. But then, given how LLMs are packaged, I’d be surprised if I had.

The default aesthetic of AI is one of helpful humanity. LLMs deal in “natural” language, trained on human words and fine-tuned using human feedback. We package them in chat interfaces — ones we associate with peer-to-peer communication — and give them “thinking” periods and streaming text, as if characters are being written onto the (digital) page. When they speak aloud, their voices are stuffed with the sounds of a body they don’t have.22 Laura Tunbridge (2016) identifies this pattern in the 2013 film Her, where Theodore falls in love with Samantha, a voice-only AI companion played by Scarlett Johansson. The plot’s success, much like the real-world acceptance of voice AI, seems to depend on our being able to imagine a body behind the voice. The choices behind Johansson’s casting and delivery reflect this — her recognisably husky voice cracking against her breath. During Samantha and Theodore’s first “fight,” she sighs, and the illusion breaks, prompting Theodore to ask: “Why do you do that? It’s not like you need oxygen or anything.” “I was trying to communicate,” she replies. “That’s how people talk.” Johansson later turned down a request to voice OpenAI’s Sky model, then threatened legal action, alleging the company had modelled it on her vocal likeness anyway. The presentation of human written text is almost flat by comparison, standardised to be portable and legible across screens.

Semantically, I can sensitise myself to the quirks of human writers, the residues of them-ness in text. But the processes of writing and thought are visually erased; little survives beyond the occasional “Asker is typing…” indicator. Meanwhile, the machines are moving the other way. In ChatGPT’s Group Chats, the model displays “ChatGPT is typing…” and sends a complete message, like a human, rather than streaming its response. So, between streamed “thoughts” and simulated typing, LLM generation now offers as much visible proof of a thinking entity behind the text as human writing does — if not more.<br>Models perform cognition in ways we can see; human thought stays hidden inside heads, inferred only from the finished text they leave behind. There is no perceivable extra-semantic difference between digital text I conscientiously laboured over and text I thoughtlessly spewed out.<br>My first reaction to this was relief. I suspect the “process anonymity” of text protects us from many a scandal. My second, though, was curiosity: human draftsmanship had silently disappeared from what I read — what if text preserved the process of writing?<br>If I could better distinguish written text from generated text, maybe I would have felt its loss. I would have better engaged with the human behind what I read. I would have appreciated the time they had taken to write something in our age of near-infinite generation, and felt whether their words came to them easily or whether they fought for them.<br>A literature review, kind of<br>I'd already encountered this question — what’s communicated beyond what’s said, by the body in the act of communicating — in another medium: music. The French literary critic Roland Barthes asks it of singers in his 1972 essay, The Grain of the Voice.33 Barthes was a man of letters who wrote about music. I’m a musician writing about text. It made sense we’d cross paths.<br>Barthes’ problem is that music...