Churchill and the Proto-AI Machine

Textual AI provides the common man with the aristocrat's advantage

Winston Churchill wrote — or produced, which is the more accurate description — somewhere around fifteen million published words, and closer to twenty million once you count the letters, memoranda, and state papers that trailed behind him like the wake behind a battleship. He did this while reporting and soldiering his way through four wars before he was thirty, sitting in Parliament for more than half a century, and serving twice as Prime Minister, the second time while leading his country and directing its military affairs during WWII. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature for those words. Forty-odd books in sixty volumes, a five-million-word wall of speeches, histories of two world wars set down by the man who had helped fight them.

His literary output was more than William Shakespeare and Charles Dickens combined.

He achieved this gargantuan accomplishment because he did not, in the ordinary sense, write. He dictated. Churchill composed out loud, pacing back-and-forth in his study with a cigar, or propped against the pillows of a morning with a breakfast tray and a secretary poised over a typewriter. Behind him was a small machine of human beings that ran quite literally around the clock. Secretaries worked in relays so that his voice never had to wait on a tired hand. For the great histories he ran what his staff called the Syndicate: researchers who dug through the archives, extricated the relevant facts, and drafted passages that Churchill would read, revise, and dictate back in his own cadence until the seams vanished and the whole thing sounded, as it always did, like his voice. Churchill’s “writing” was less a single man at his desk than a small industrial concern with a single editorial mind at the top of it.

Notice what that arrangement did and what did not do. It did not think for him. It did not supply the subject, the argument, the sweep, the judgment about what stayed in and what could be struck out, and above all it did not supply the voice, that music of the English sentence he prized above nearly everything and defended as “that noble thing.” What the Syndicate removed was the drudgery: the fact-mining, the first crude ordering of raw material, and most of all the sheer physical bottleneck of laying down words one at a time by hand. Churchill had grasped something most writers never allow themselves to believe, because it destroys the romance of the craft and the idea that the seat of the writing is the writer’s own hand. The hand is actually a filter, and a narrow one at that. The writing happens upstream, in the intelligence that shapes and guides the ideas; and if you can widen the filter without muddying the water, you can pour out ten times as much.

This is exactly what writing with a textual AI model is. Strip away the novelty and the technophobia and you are looking at the Syndicate again, only one turn of the wheel further along and automated. The model takes the place of the tireless relay of secretaries and the archive-quarrying researcher folded into a single instrument: it drafts on command, produces raw material at speed, takes a rough instruction and hands back something with shape already in it. And it casts the writer into exactly the chair Churchill occupied at the head of his little concern, the editor-in-chief, the one who decides what the thing is about, who cuts and reshapes and dictates back, who stamps the whole with a voice the machinery beneath could never have invented. The bottleneck it removes is the mechanical cost of production, the single hand that can only move so fast.

And the standing objection that the machine “writes the book for you” vanishes under the same light of examination, because it was never true of Churchill’s method and it is not true of this one. A Syndicate that handed Churchill finished prose to sign would have produced forgettable committee-work under a famous name. What made the histories his, what made them Churchillian, was that he never once let the apparatus near the two things that mattered: the judgment and the voice. The identical rule applies now, and it is everything. Point the model at the drudgery and keep the shaping for yourself, and you get amplification of your work and your voice. You get more of it, and faster. Hand the model the judgment and the voice as well, and you get exactly what the technophobes and Luddites predict: flavourless, flattened, anonymous prose, the literary equivalent of a form letter.

The tool does not decide the nature of the output. The writer decides, by deciding what he will control..

Which is why the honest way to think about writing with a machine is not as the replacement of the author but as the return of a very old and rather aristocratic advantage, now within reach of anyone. For most of history only a Churchill, a wealthy man with the means to hire a Syndicate and command a room of secretaries through the night, could uncouple his output from the crippling delay of his own hand. Everyone else set down one hard word after another and was rationed accordingly. The machine now offers that same force-multiplier to the working novelist at his desk, to the historian, to the writer of no particular fame at all. Winston Churchill is the proof that the writer’s hand was never where the writing lived, and that the one who removes it does not, in consequence, write worse. He writes vastly more, so long as he continues to supply the two things that matter: the mind behind the words, and the voice that makes them unmistakably his own.

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