The Joy of Academic Writing in the Age of AI

I once imagined an academic career involved a lofty devotion to knowledge at a distance from the world. This is what Bourdieu (2000: 1) described as “the free time, freedom from the urgencies of the world, that allows a free and liberated relation to those urgencies and to the world”. Or as the philosopher Richard Rorty once put it to a friend asking him about whether he was happy in this new role, “Universities permit one to read books and report what one thinks about them, and get paid for it” (Gross 2003).

Even if this was true of a tenured professor at an Ivy League university in 1980s America, it certainly isn’t true now for the vast majority of academics. It took me a while to come to terms with that fact, but what was constant in this process was the enjoyment of writing. It was precisely because of that enjoyment, the impulse ‘to read books and report what I thought about them’, that the reality of academic work felt so disappointing to me. It’s something I’ve long since made my peace with, but the fact it was a compromise I came to has left the enjoyment of writing at the heart of my professional self-conception: the space that can be found for it and the obstacles which stand in its way.

Unfortunately those obstacles are numerous. There are the new things which academics are expected to do, such as make research relevant to wider society and the mechanisms, such as social media, through which we are expected to do it. There is the growth in the work to be done as student numbers increase and our interactions with them increasingly take place through multiple channels. There are the spiralling expectations of what constitutes being productive, driven in part by a job market which is brutally competitive in some systems.

I take as background the widespread sense that there is a deep somatic crisis in higher education, which has structural roots (Burrows 2012). As Vostal (2016) demonstrates, it would be too simple to say the problem is one of speeding up, to which the solution would be to slow down. The evidence suggests that our relationship to speed is more ambivalent than this. I certainly recognize the enjoyment which can be realized through rushing under the right circumstances, such as the intense focus which can come with an imminent deadline or the intellectual sociability generated through an intensive workshop.

There is also a politics to speed too often overlooked by advocates of ideas like the ‘slow professor’ (Berg 2022). In my experience, the choice for a professor to slow down often relies on post docs who are willing to pick up the slack for them. But there is nonetheless a sense of rushing, of never having quite enough time for all the things we are expected to do, common within the contemporary academy (Carrigan 2016).

Obviously this is an experience which is far from confined to academics and the university, reflecting a broader sense of being harried in contemporary societies (Rosa 2014). It is easy for the time and space in which we might enjoy writing to find itself squeezed on all sides by the urgent items we are struggling to clear from our to-do list. It is easy to conclude from this experience that writing necessarily has to be a slow process, in which an excess of time and space provide the conditions in which creative writing is possible.

This is fundamentally mistaken, with the sense that writing requires an abundance of time actually being a potent obstacle to a regular and rewarding writing routine. But it is conversely difficult to immerse yourself in writing if you feel harried, assailed on all sides by unmet expectations and impending deadlines. There is a risk this leads to a sense of enjoying writing being a luxury, as opposed to a practical requirement of the job which must be dispensed with as quickly and efficiently as possible.

If you frame writing in these terms then the instrumental use of AI becomes an inevitability. Why wouldn’t you rely on these systems to do your writing for you if that writing is an unwelcome obligation which weighs heavily on your working life? This gets to the heart of my concern. There is a pessimistic and self-defeating mood which too often accompanies academic writing. This is a problem in its own terms because it makes what should be a source of joy for academics into a gruelling chore. But with the advent of a technology which can do this writing for us, this mood goes from being individually self-defeating to potentially catastrophic for the knowledge system.

As Sword (2023: loc 220) points out, “writing signals hard work and puritanical virtue, while pleasure drips with hedonistic vice”. The tendency for academics to relate to writing as a serious matter, serving a lofty purpose beyond the trivial matters of feeling, rather than something which pleasure can be taken in makes it difficult to have these conversations. I share Sword’s (2023: loc 226) project “to recuperate pleasure as a legitimate, indeed crucial, writing-related emotion”. Indeed, such a recuperation is imperative, individually and collectively, because of the impact which AI is already starting to exercise over why and how we write.

If you’re taking joy in an activity, why would you outsource it? I struggle to see a difference in this sense between relying on machine writing and seeking an assistant who can work on your behalf. There might be contingent challenges which mean you need support at a particular point in time, as well as a need to prioritize certain tasks over others. In this sense I wouldn’t suggest the impulse to outsource a task necessarily means you don’t take joy in it, but if you persistently seek external support for a type of task or a project composed of multiple tasks, this suggests the potential for exploring your motivation.

There are parts of my administrative work which I’ve found myself tempted to rely on machine writing for. I’ve come to realize this is a red flag which indicates there’s a part of my portfolio of work I’m struggling with in some way or coming to be alienated from. The impulse to outsource it to a machine, to just get it done immediately rather than expanding any more energy on it, will become a mainstream one within higher education over the coming years. The ubiquity of this software, particularly as it comes to be embedded in the existing collaboration platforms which universities provide for their staff, means it will be ‘in here’ rather than ‘out there’.

Meeting this temptation reflexively requires that we understand our work, the tasks that compose it, and how we tend to experience them. Do we persistently avoid or procrastinate from particular activities? What do we choose to do instead when we’re being avoidant? These questions help us identify which aspects of our academic writing might be at risk of being outsourced to AI, not because the technology offers genuine improvements, but because we’ve lost touch with the joy those activities might provide.