Is AI really ‘writing’? From a priestess to philosophers, ancient authors would have said ‘no’

I teach writing and rhetoric, but my college students and I often overlook a surprisingly complicated question: What is writing?

And can artificial intelligence really do it?

Many people think of “writing” as putting words on a page. However, even from very early on, writers have seen their craft as something more. From Enheduanna, the first named author on record, to Plato and Aristotle, writing has been portrayed and defined in ways that suggest AI may not be “writing” at all.

If not, what should we call AI text? ChatGPT and I have an idea.

Praising and pleading

Enheduanna, who lived around 2,300 B.C.E., was a powerful princess, priestess and poet of the Akkadian Empire, in what is now Iraq. She has been celebrated as the earliest known writer, though the authorship of her poems and hymns is debated.

One of her poems, “The Exaltation of Inanna,” reveals a sense of what writing is and does – portraying it as a living medium that expresses experience and shapes the future.

First, the poem praises the ancient Mesopotamian goddess Inanna, who was associated with fertility and war, among other powers. “My Lady, you are the guardian / Of all greatness,” Enheduanna says, in a translation by Jane Hirschfield.

A tablet in the Penn Museum in Philadelphia inscribed with a copy of Enheduanna’s ‘Exaltation of Inanna.’
Masha Stoyanova/Flickr via Wikimedia Commons

That praise may be strategic. It is followed by Enheduanna’s plea to overthrow Lugal-Ane, a rebel king who she describes exiling her and taking her post at the temple of Ur. “Now I have been cast out / To the place of lepers,” she writes, describing her suffering. “Day comes, / And the brightness / Is hidden around me.”

Grieving, Enheduanna writes a new destiny. In a translation by Sophus Helle, the priestess envisions Inanna coming to her aid and “tear[ing] off this fate, Lugale-Ane.”…

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