Why Do We Write?
Blogs and extras are bonus content to supplement the work in our issues. We asked Nastasha Rau, author of The World Maker in Issue 20 and social media editor for Headland, for her perspectives on AI in literature.
Image: Benjamin Goddfrey
Why do we write? In a world of ChatGPT, AI overviews and /imagine it’s easy to take a few mental leaps into a dystopian near-future where human writers (and other creatives) have no place in society. Indeed, in the past two submission periods of Headland, we’ve received multiple entries with the hallmarks of having been bot-generated.
So, what’s the issue?
If an AI is capable of writing (though I hesitate to even use this word) a good story, why shouldn’t it be used? The visceral reaction I have to this viewpoint is hard to encapsulate beyond a desire to set fire to a computer; however, for the purposes of this essay, I will try to coalesce that rage into something resembling a sensible argument.
A quick disclaimer before we begin: I have no doubt that there are voices more deserving than mine to speak on this subject, and whose understanding of the environmental, social and moral impacts of AI is far more nuanced than mine. I am not a professor of language, an IT specialist, a philosopher, nor am I widely published. So, what qualifies me?
Perhaps nothing more than the fact that I am human and my earliest memory is of my grandmother telling me stories.
I was three years old when I got my first library card—a blue laminated rectangle, organised for me by my gran. Every Wednesday we’d go down and select a few books for me to take home for the week. I had a particular ritual where I’d select a dozen or so and get her to read them aloud so I could decide which were worthy of being taken home and subsequently re-read enough times to drive my poor parents half-mad. This worked out well for any other children who happened to be around, who regarded my gran as one of the library employees, and would bring her their own selections for a kind of impromptu Story Time.
Often, despite this ritual, once I was home and in bed, I would disregard our carefully curated pile and ask for “a story from your head”. To my delight, she would create tales of magic and adventure for me on the spot. And while this could easily digress into a love letter to my late gran, my point is that even at an age where Peter Rabbit was the pinnacle of literature, some part of me recognised the intrinsic value of storytelling.
There is an intimacy to writing, to any art form, which simply cannot be replicated by a machine. Nothing is written in a vacuum, and some part of the creator is always captured in the creation. At Headland, we receive a wide variety of work, both fiction and non-fiction. When reading submissions, even when there is not one hint of who the author is, if the narrative does not in any way reflect their life, or even real events, you cannot help but come to know them—through their cadence, their particular fondness for imagery, a detail observed in a way which lets you in on a secret shared only between writer and reader.
This relationship cannot be faked by a machine, no matter how well trained. A machine has not lived a life, or been inspired by the works it has read (though it may have stolen from them). A computer doesn’t stubbornly use the Oxford comma because it annoyed their 8th grade English teacher, until it becomes an engrained part of their style.
At the moment, it is still fairly easy to spot AI-generated writing. It may resemble coherent work, often reminiscent of the style of a particular author or genre, but generally, the work doesn’t make sense as a whole. It’s like the old saying of a thousand monkeys on typewriters producing Shakespeare. Except that in this case the monkeys broke into The Bard’s house, stole his notes, and plagiarised a version of Hamlet in which he has two left hands, and occasionally says his lines backwards.
However, the issue still wouldn’t be resolved if these models eventually learned to replicate technically sound, objectively pleasing work. Ironically, this is the part where my words start to fail me. How do you describe an absence, what is lacking, when the thing itself is intangible? How do you explain to a machine that is does not have a soul?
Of course, there are tangible impacts too, and I would be remiss in writing a piece championing human writers over generative AI if I did not take the time to address these. Artists and writers are increasingly finding that their work, created through the use of hard-won skills, is being strip-mined and fed into generative models which spit out second-rate copies which only avoid being officially plagiaristic by the convolutions of their fine-print. In some cases, lawsuits have been filed, but AI continues its pervasive invasion of many of the platforms and spaces in which artists learn, promote themselves and grow. While it is true that human writers are inspired and influenced by the bodies of work by which they are surrounded and preceded, it is the blatant disregard of ethics and accountability expressed in the instances of AI plagiarism which truly drives me up the wall.
In addition to this greedy, lazy takeover of precious skills in favour of cheap, quick results, one has to consider the impact on the job market. Entry level jobs are under the hammer, with a survey by the International Data Corporation showing that 91% of companies responded that AI had displaced or significantly changed roles1.
And that’s before we even get started on the environmental impact. A request made through ChatGPT consumes 10 times the electricity of a Google search2. Data centres are devouring fresh water, putting even more strain on an already scarce resource2.
I grew up as part of the generation that were told we could save the planet if we saved water, turned off the light, recycled: in short, “did our bit”. This duty of care toward our planet inspired me to major in Biological Science, even as we began to backslide. The global shift toward cleaner energy and environmentalism has been slow and hard won, and so it has been devastating to see how quickly all that hard work has been abandoned for the cheap thrill of some bot generating Die Hard in the style of Jane Austen.
Some would argue that AI is still in its infancy, that many of these problems may be ruled out in time. Say AI improves to the point where it has minimal environmental impact, and legislation prevents it from taking jobs in an already over-competitive market, and those whose work is used to train it are fairly compensated. Imagine a future where it is simply a neat little gadget which churns out excellently structured plots with perfect grammar. Would I accept it then?
I suppose it comes down to this. Why do we write?
Is it purely for entertainment value, to provide a product which may be consumed without discretion? Or is it because we crave the intangible connection which comes from sharing a deeply private part of ourselves, allowing total strangers to crawl into our minds and see the world through our eyes?
There is no denying I hold a romantic’s view of the art of writing. I believe that all humans are capable of writing something wonderful, even if it’s as simple and beautiful as a note in your child’s lunchbox.
I think perhaps, at the heart of the issue, is that there is something intimate about writing. I’m no anthropologist, and from what I understand there is no unifying argument within the field as to what sets us apart as a species, behaviourally. But I’d like to think that somewhere in the shadows of our history, someone sat around a crackling campfire and, for the first time, told a story. And I think that story wrapped itself around our bones, and that one day, when we are nothing more than motes of dust floating through a cold universe, that story will still be whispering itself to the dying stars.
I don’t want narratives which can be pigeonholed or replicated from a template of what is formulaically ideal. I want writing that makes me think, that makes me feel, that makes me grasp for words to describe what happens in my chest when I read it.
We are all capable of creation, but those of us who are called to be writers are fundamentally incapable of not being so. Writing is a form of expression, a love letter, a primal scream, a bursting forth of whatever consumes us so that we are driven to creation by a burning passion which cannot be repressed.
Why do we write?
Because we are human, and we will not settle for anything else.
- Rod McNaughton, ‘As entry‑level jobs dry up in NZ, how can we help young people find their way into work?’, The Conversation, 20 April 2026, https://theconversation.com/as-entry-level-jobs-dry-up-in-nz-how-can-we-help-young-people-find-their-way-into-work-280813
- The United Nations, ‘Environment Under Review: AI has an environmental problem. Here’s what the world can do about that’, UN Environment Program, 21 September 2024, https://www.unep.org/news-and-stories/story/ai-has-environmental-problem-heres-what-world-can-do-about
