I've been asked to sit on a panel to discuss innovations in writing practice. It's at a writing symposium to be held next week and putting it mildly, I am terrified. There are a few reasons for this. Significantly, the symposium is being attended by some of the most wonderful thinkers about writing practice. In fact, although they may not realise, through the open sharing of their knowledge, they helped me from afar in many ways to improve my own writing, and to understand what academic writing actually is. Then there are many experts in the field of research development who I am aware of and some of whom have had the privilege of working with in the past. Again, these brilliant minds devote so much of themselves to helping others develop their writing craft and find their researcher identities. I feel hopelessly unqualified to contribute to this audience.

In terms of output, most of what I write will never be read as my academic writing output is minimal. These days the writing I gain most pleasure from has no audience as it is unpublished journaling, with an occasional essay that I might muster up the courage to post on my blog. What could I possibly offer in terms of contributing to a dialogue on writing innovation?

When I consider innovation, writing would not be an area on the top of the list. However, there have been recent technical innovations that have turned the nature of writing as we have known it on its head. By this I mean the introduction of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI). While recently there has been some calming down of the hype surrounding it, this tool makes it possible for us human writers to use machines to easily generate text that would seem to have been written by a person. And while the technology is surrounded by concerning ethical and ecological impacts, if anything, it has forced me to consider more closely what it means to be a person, conscious and particularly understanding meaning through writing.

There is widespread uncritical acceptance that we all need to just get on board with this technology or get left behind. While there are some dissenting voices, most people I encounter in my daily life seem to be content to treat this technology as inevitable. There are a many aspects to the introduction of GenAI that make me uncomfortable, but for the moment these are a couple of significance: The environmental impact of this technology is frankly the last thing we need right at this point in history. The ecological impacts data centres impose through their voracious need of electricity and water contribute to climate change. Socially, we were still not adequately able to cope with the deleterious outcomes of social media before GenAI gained momentum. The former was already tearing at the social fabric, distorting perspectives and contributing to polarisation of communities; the latter will only serve to amplify this as it's the MO of organisations that degraded social media that sits behind the most avid proponents of GenAI.

I want to opt in to GenAI on my own terms. I don't want these tools pushed at me at every turn. I don't want to have to agree to the "updated terms and conditions that allow you to use my data for AI" that get sent out from seemingly every organisation I'm subscribed to. I find it challenging when I hear "AI", not to conflate this term with 'tech bros' and the big players like Open AI, Microsoft and Google. While I know it's not as simple as this, it sets alarm bells going off in my head all over the place. The motivations of the corporations behind the mainstream tools are dubious at best and more likely an expression of late stage capitalism at its worst. In other words: we'll take everything freely, sell it back to you at a premium, destroy the environment in the process and eliminate as much of the workforce as possible. Naturally, if these tools were being developed under an alternate political paradigm there would be no issue. Please, develop the technology in an environmentally sustainable way, perform all the mundane and tedious tasks, pay us all a living wage (UBI) and we can get on with having better quality lives and working to improve things where they most need them.

But I acknowledge that these tools are just that, tools (even though they are steeped in political and social significance). Some in university and academia have found a way to use them to speed up mundane administrative tasks, thus freeing up time for research and writing. For now, this isn't a problem that faces me, and I would probably be inclined to do the same if I was in that position. However, I'd say to anyone who needs to use GenAI: consider open source solutions to avoid engaging with the multinationals pushing GenAI so forcefully. There is significant development taking place around open source options, such as Ollama and Open WebUI. These can be found on sites such as Hugging Face. There are currently over two million models published on this site. These can be run on a local machine and sandboxed for privacy.

But returning to how these tools have spurned on a sense of deeper self-analysis, honestly, some good has come of these developments. It's forced me to reflect on what the actual point of writing is. There is no one point of course, but on a personal level, writing is a process; it's a way of engaging with the self and with others. I recall in the early days of undertaking my PhD, when the prospect of writing a dissertation was unsettling and quite frankly, I really had no notion of how it could be done. What I came to realise – through the process – was that academic writing is intertextual. What that means is important. We search for those who have written related ideas to our own; we read these ideas; grapple with them; and then seek to engage with them by arguing against them, extending them or presenting an alternative perspective to them. When we write therefore, we write with others and importantly, we learn through this process. Admittedly, writing is slow and tedious at times; sometimes it goes nowhere; others it takes us new places. It is occasionally steeped in anxiety and fear, but this process cannot exist if we skip over it completely and have a machine spit out some text for us.

Fundamentally, language formation is steeped in what it means to be human. We form our utterances to express ourselves, find our position in the world and seek to make connections with others. Language is a human endeavour. What do we lose by delegating this to machines? It's worth reflecting on this.

So if GenAI is not an innovation that I want to embrace, what else is there?

A couple of days ago, while I was browsing a bookshop shelf, quite by accident I had a serendipitous discovery when I picked up Index Cards, by Moyra Davey. This reminded me of recent experiments with forming my own personal knowledge management system using the Zettelkasten method. I think that the writing of ideas and the thinking process, at least for me is non-linear and fragmented. The Zettelkasten method, which was developed by the sociologist Niklas Luhmann, was a method to link ideas when using the paper-based index card system. The system facilitates the interconnection of ideas through a tagging method that links individual notes. With current digital note taking tools, like Obsidian, this tagging can be easily achieved. The method lends itself to developing, linking and building on concepts in an organic way. By using the visualisation feature of Obsidian, the network of concepts can be shown in a map, which displays the linkages as they grow and develop. I've decided to use this method for a new writing project and I'm excited about where this might lead.