This article is featured in the 2025 Homecoming Special Issue.
Re: Professors, companies and the College: Tensions in AI
Lately, I’ve felt a sense of nihilism creep into my endeavors to write. As artificial intelligence becomes more and more advanced, it sometimes feels pointless to even try to create. Why would I put so much labor and effort into creating something if an entity that can’t feel anything at all manages to do it better than I? Especially when so many other things, like watching television or sleeping all day, are so much easier.
This feeling of robbery is something I have talked with many writers about in the past few months. These conversations have only brought me more hope, though, for two main reasons.
First, even if an AI can produce a story twice as great as yours, it will never be able to take away the fact that through writing, you learn to live life better and understand the world more deeply. The pursuit of this understanding and appreciation for life is fundamental to humanness, and so the desire to do it is completely intrinsic, separate from any external credit.
Second, I believe that people still appreciate writing that captures genuine human emotion, and are just as interested in beautiful prose as they are about the person behind the work. The best part of good writing is that it’s a deep conversation with a fellow human.
It is in this vein that I want to encourage readers to approach new works by prioritizing and understanding the feelings of the writer behind a work. This is an act of resistance against unending technological advance. I would also like to encourage people to write in their own words. The appreciation for life one reaps is treasure enough.
Eli Moyse ’27 is an opinion editor and columnist for The Dartmouth. He studies government and creative writing. He publishes various personal work under a pen name on Substack (https://substack.com/@wesmercer), and you can find his other work in various publications.
