Bulking Up

On the very day it became clear to me that I needed to put guardrails on AI editing—telling it to keep 90% of my original content to prevent my writing from morphing from my natural bodybuilder self into the PED-bloated version—I attended my daughters’ high school open house, where their English teacher told us she was teaching the students AI literacy. This entailed helping them use AI to “bulk up their resumes” because, in a competitive world where everyone was using AI, our children could not afford not to use generative AI. In fact, the teacher said, AI itself is now sorting through resumes and discarding the ones that aren’t sufficiently juiced up.

It became clear to me that we are living inside a contradiction. On the one hand, writing needs to be “bulked up” and “on the juice” simply to compete with other AI-enhanced writing. On the other hand, in our post-reading society, where literacy rates are in steep decline, writing itself has never seemed more forlorn and withered. We are producing prose with bigger muscles at precisely the moment when our own writing muscles are beginning to atrophy.

I was living through a cataclysmic moment in history. My personal retirement from teaching college writing had dovetailed with the world’s collective retirement from the kinds of literary pastimes that develop interiority and critical thinking. Reading books was becoming a rarity. Books had been displaced by sports gambling and short-form videos. To complicate matters, Rose Horowitch observes in “The End of Reading Is Here” that Americans have never read so much. The problem is that much of what they are reading is slop: “bulked up” AI writing, threads, captions, and text messages. Horowitch points to UCLA cognitive neuroscientist Maryanne Wolf, who argues that “people are losing the ability to think deeply about writing.” The brain muscles required for this kind of thinking are atrophying, perhaps to the point of no return. As a result, we are moving toward a postliterate society.

This is not a stagnant condition. It gets progressively worse. New generations may read less and less. They may become increasingly inclined to see teachers’ reading assignments as punitive. Bereft of strong reading and writing skills, they will need AI to “bulk up” their assigned writing more and more.

Members of a postliterate society are vulnerable because they live increasingly at the surface level. They don’t dig underneath a text to find subtext, subtlety, and contradiction. They struggle to identify the logical fallacies that accompany manipulation. They can become more vulnerable to demagogues and more susceptible to being duped. A society that loses these habits of critical reading also risks weakening the habits of thought on which democratic life depends.

A postliterate society also loses something of its humanity when its members can no longer recognize the richness of what, in good writing, we call authorial presence. To savor such presence in the writing of James Baldwin, H. L. Mencken, Evelyn Waugh, and Annie Dillard is part of being human.

Not all is lost. Humans still find authorial presence in YouTube presentations, podcasts, and musical artists. No amount of AI “bulking up” can replicate the spectacular music and persona of SZA.

But authorial presence in writing may be disappearing. “Bulking up” writing may eventually mean the death of writing.

I may not simply be retiring from teaching writing. I may be retiring at the very moment I have become increasingly misaligned with a world that is uncoupling itself from literacy while diligently bulking up its resumes.