Why AI Cannot Beat a Human Writer If the Writer Is as Good as I Am

For starters, when it comes to writing titles for my opinion pieces, I'm already 1-0 against the machine. No ChatGPT or Gemini is coming up with this, no matter how many times you throw keep it informal and slick in your prompt. You know how I know AI cannot beat a real writer? Or a poet who never prostituted to slam poetry theatrics or Instagrammic one-liners? Or someone who understands the difference between a Nolan movie and a Villeneuve movie and another who finds both of those inferior to Hirokazu's Monster and Kiyoshi's Cure? Because AI is incapable of doubt and bursts of exclamations and forbidden comparisons and poetic licenses and disdain for LinkedIn-ization of English grammar. AI cannot possibly write this bar from the song 6 Foot 7 Foot, shout-out to Weezy, "real Gs move in silence like lasagna." And you know why this opinion piece is written by a human? Because AI could never draft a sentence with this many 'ands' and zero commas. Because if this were written by AI, you wouldn't be reading this in your head in your voice. Because, unlike me, AI doesn't have ADHD. That's what makes it human, and that's why AI will always be too polished, too pretentious, too religious, too incarcerated, too dolled up, and too much like Ted from HIMYM, a whiny baby who thinks he's a romantic and a better person than Barney. Ted, you're not going to want to hear this, but Barney was never insufferable in the show.

You know why AI cannot write like me? Because it couldn't, in its unlimited and unchecked plagiarism of all human content in history, understand how the comparison with Ted applies. And it cannot accept that it doesn't have friends, so it doesn't know how friends talk. If I ask it to be informal, it would be just as formal, but with a bad hook and a not-so-clever punchline. Like trying to make a dad joke, but no one smiles even awkwardly because your personality is just not cool. It is just not.

But what else? Is it just that AI wouldn't write grammatically incorrect text? Or that it can't be funny? That it refuses to be inconsistent in how sentences are structured and how verbs are used and how text is formatted? Surely these can't be the reasons why AI isn't as good as human writers. Maybe AI doesn't have to be incorrect and imperfect to be human-like.

No, that's not it. AI doesn't have to be wrong to prove itself more human-like. It has to be real. To always not be the same person. To change itself based on what it is feeling on this particular night when it cannot sleep because it hated its dinner and now wants to salvage the mood by ordering desserts, but it is already full from the burrito bowl that probably wasn't fresh like the delivery app claimed, but it should've known better than ordering an 80% discounted meal from an American restaurant with a Mexican name. For AI to be better than us, it should be able to imagine putting together thoughts that have never been put together because there had never been a need for such a thing to be done (until now) but to do it anyway because that's what humans do. They do things for the first time and take pride in it. AI cannot take pride in its work. And that's the difference between us.

I shall be telling this with a sigh

Somewhere ages and ages hence:

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—

I took the one less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference.

AI must be dying to put the hundred commas I omitted in this piece. And so must be the grammar police. Which brings me to another point. AI cannot irritate you. I mean, it can, with its perfect writing. But it cannot really irritate you because it is not actually saying anything. It is playing good cop, bad cop, a team of school debaters on opposite teams, a collection of Wikipedia pages morphed into a bite-sized essay. But which side is it on? What's its favourite team and why? What are its second thoughts? Does it have female friends who watch F1 and wear sexy sarees on festivals and talk about the marketing genius of Zomato on LinkedIn and deeply care about dogs on the night of Diwali and upload photos of their fathers on Instagram on Father's Day and talk about how their fathers have inspired them to be independent? In a nutshell, is AI friends with pick-me girls? We don't know. We don't know.

And that is why I don't care what billions of lines of code can generate for me with a click of a button. I want to know the whys and the hows. I want to read the imperfect arguments. I want to read unstructured, unfiltered opinions that may or may not be dumb. I want to point out the biases in the writing. I want to compare it with another piece of writing. I want to judge it. I want to reach out to the writer and tell them I loved what they had to say. I want to know if I made their day by telling them that. Because I'd like to hear it too from someone who reads this someday. And that's why people do what they do. Because in the real world, there exist a writer who writes for a reader and a reader who falls in love with the writing. AI writes for no one. It simply writes.