AI and Error Writing

The apparent ease by which generative AI produces writing that looks the part should give pause for thought to anyone, any group of people or profession whose manner of expression is being imitated. Certainly, academic writing in its most staid and predictable forms would appear to be eminently imitable. One might hope the ease by which it can be produced will present academia with a crisis it perhaps deserves. Namely, just how daring, how original, how significant is this intellectual project known as the University, if the major forms of expression, its chief evidences of thinking, can be so easily churned out by an algorithm. This paper argues that experimental and heterodox approaches to writing could not be more urgently needed, and if there is one area in which human authors can exceed AI, it is in their capacity to err and make mistakes. This is a capacity that might be developed by forms of targetted irreverence and mischief making that are described here as ‘error writing’. The paper concludes with an excerpt from recently published novel in which a type of error writing was attempted.