AI chatbots aren't just cramping your writing style—they're destroying it

If years of reading draft opinion articles (op-eds) were to give rise to a belief system, one of its dogmas might be that all ideas and examples must come in threes. A stronger Lebanese economy requires better governance, reduced conflict and international partnerships. To fight climate change, we must involve governments, businesses and civil society. In the interest of a bit of iconoclasm, I’ll avoid giving a third example.

Communications consultants, whose fingerprints are often all over such drafts, call this the “rule of three”. They point to famous phrases that have shaped our world, like Julius Caesar’s “veni, vidi, vici” (“I came, I saw, I conquered”), or the US Declaration of Independence’s “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”.

So ingrained is this convention that there is a whole taxonomy for articulating ideas in threes. The three-part list itself is called a triad. If the words in all three elements are equal in length or the same part of speech, they’re called a tricolon. If they all express parts of a common idea, they’re a hendiatris.

We often don’t even notice the rule at work. A couple of years ago, I gave a talk on op-ed writing to a global PR agency’s UAE office. In a lame attempt at humour, I gave three reasons they should try to avoid the rule of three. I got a couple of courtesy laughs, but most of the audience studiously copied the reasons down in their notebooks.

Some think the appeal of the rule of three is natural – something from within our psyche makes it attractive. Maybe if I had been Caesar’s speechwriter or Thomas Jefferson’s copy editor, today history would be less inspiring.

Would today’s op-ed drafts, at least, be more interesting? There’s a theory that says no, probably not. The French philosopher Rene Girard, who died 10 years ago this week, argued that just about everything we want – and by extension, most of what we do – is the result of mimesis, or imitating the desires and behaviours of others. Usually, the model we imitate is someone smarter, more attractive, richer or more powerful than us. There are very few original thoughts or innate desires in the mimetic world. We don’t emulate Caesar’s pattern of speech because it was good style, but because it was Caesar’s. Had he come, seen, conquered and also done a fourth thing, today we’d have a rule of four.

This sort of thinking shrinks the gap between us and the large-language models (LLMs) that drive AI chatbots. Like them, we spend our lives training on the outputs of others. And we spit out some reformulation of information from this data set that is intended to sound “original”. If all of this fills you with a sense of ennui, try to remember that we are talking about French philosophy.

ChatGPT has become an increasingly popular tool in drafting and summarising written content. Reuters

I don’t subscribe – at least, not entirely – to a mimetic worldview. If I didn’t believe people were capable of having original thoughts, I doubt I could really do my job. Yet, the rise of the LLMs is undoubtedly making the world a more mimetic place.

My colleagues and I on The National’s Opinion Desk now see it almost every day. Draft submissions that repeat the same sentence formulation – “X isn’t just Y—it’s Z” – in successive paragraphs have become so common they make me look back on the rule of three with deep nostalgia, like a screentime-weary millennial turning on the record player.

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