There is an old argument about writing that suddenly feels less old than it should. In fact, I think it’s surprisingly relevant.
In Plato’s Phaedrus, Socrates tells the story of Theuth. He’s the Egyptian figure credited with inventing writing. Theuth offers it as a gift, a powerful tool that will aid in memory and make people wiser. But King Thamus isn’t persuaded. Writing, he says, will not deepen wisdom at all. It will weaken memory by moving knowledge outside the mind, and it will leave people with the appearance of understanding rather than the real thing.
I’ve often referred to this as culturally interesting, but rather exaggerated. Writing didn’t destroy thought. It became one of its great vessels of expression. It preserved human thought from religion to science. And in that context, it gave human thought the power to travel across centuries. If anything, writing seemed to prove Socrates wrong.
But that may be changing. Writing hasn’t failed, but the conditions around it, particularly AI and LLMs, have radically changed it. And this demands a closer look.
The written word once carried a human trace
Writing is more than words on a page. It reflects effort and the difficult mechanics of human thought such as judgment, revision, and struggle. Behind the words is a mind trying to work something out. Writing has what I would call a biography behind it. It comes from somewhere and it belongs to someone. That gives the written word a kind of authority that is not only literary, but psychological. It feels connected to a person.
That connection is detaching.
Large language models can write. The prose is often smooth and the structure is darn convincing. And when language can be generated that easily and at that scale, writing begins to lose some of what made it feel substantial in the first place.
It no longer reliably signals the labor of thought.
This is a critical shift. The issue here isn’t just that machines can write, but that writing itself starts to feel detached from the human struggle and friction that give it substance and worth.
When Fluency Begins to Feel Vacant
I believe that many people sense this already, even if they wouldn’t describe it in exactly these terms. More and more contemporary writing feels oddly empty. It isn’t necessarily false, and it isn’t always bad, but it often seems more orchestrated or contrived than writing once did, as though the words are in place while something has gone missing.
What once felt like the “imperfectly imperfect” construct of thought can now feel more like a polished product with a shiny yet superficial reflection. That subtle loss matters, because it changes how writing is experienced and what we believe it represents.
This is where Plato’s anxiety becomes newly interesting. Socrates feared that writing would create the appearance of wisdom without its substance. For centuries, that did not quite happen because writing still carried the trace or essence of a writer. Even static text pointed back to a living mind.
But now, we’re entering a world where the written word can quickly circulate with very little evidence that anyone truly struggled to construct it. This warning wasn’t correct in the ancient world, but may be becoming correct in ours.
Why Speech May Begin to Matter Again
Now, if writing loses some of its old authority, we may begin looking elsewhere for signs of genuine thought, and one obvious place to look is human speech. In many ways it is messier than writing—less structured and more spontaneous. Even so, speech still carries a presence that feel harder to manufacture in the same way.
A live voice can be challenged, and in that challenge it can be subject to interrogation. And if those qualities begin to matter more, then something larger may shift with them. Authority or validation may begin moving away from the written record and back toward live performance, toward what can be spoken and defended in the moment. That would be more than a literary change, it would be a cultural one.
There’s something attractive to me about that possibility because it restores a sense of immediacy, of a mind visibly at work. But we need to point out the danger as well. Presence isn’t truth, and a charismatic speaker can mislead us just as easily as an LLM can generate polished prose. The return of speech wouldn’t solve the problem but relocate it. Still, the movement itself tells us something important—it suggests that writing—from term paper to court brief—no longer feels like enough.
Plato’s Warning, Revised
So, I don’t think Socrates was right about writing—it didn’t make us shallow. It became one of the great achievements of civilization because it preserved thought and gave human reflection a durable, almost timeless form.
But his warning is beginning to sound relevant for reasons he could never have imagined. The written word earned its authority because it preserved ideas. But also because it seemed to carry the trace of a person behind them. That authority is now being weakened by AI that can generate language without the lived experience or the cognitive burden that once stood behind the words.
That may be why so much of today’s posts and prose feel strangely vacant. Language has become easier to separate from the human mind that once gave it both substance and meaning. Socrates feared that writing would give us the appearance of wisdom without the discipline of truly knowing. In our age of large language models, that no longer sounds like an ancient complaint. It sounds like a warning.