“Transformations in Writing Between Paper and Artificial Intelligence”... on the agenda of the Kuwaiti Writers

In the Dr. Suad Al-Sabah Hall at the Kuwait Writers Association, the discussion on “Transformations in Writing Between Paper and Artificial Intelligence” was rich and insightful, featuring researcher and writer Talal Al-Amir and poet and AI programmer Salah Dibsha. The session, part of the “Summer Cultural 18” festival events, was moderated by writer and translator Huda Karimi.

Kuwaiti sign language interpreter Mariam Al-Harbi also participated in the session, helping to make its content accessible to various segments of society. The event was attended by Fawziya Al-Ali, chair of the Cultural Activities Committee at the National Council for Culture, Arts and Letters; Afrah Al-Hindal, chair of the Cultural Committee at the Kuwait Writers Association; Loujain Al-Nashwan, chair of the Social Committee; and a number of cultural and literary enthusiasts.

At the outset of the session, Karimi said, “Since the first human left their mark on cave walls, they have been engaged in an eternal battle against oblivion. Writing is humanity’s greatest invention; through it, we have preserved memory, and civilizations have crossed from the shore of transience to the shore of eternity. Through it, the absent becomes present, and fleeting ideas become monuments inhabited by generations.”

She added, “In this session, we are building a bridge between two eras: the era of the first murals, where the word was born, and the era of artificial intelligence, where the word is being tested.”

Al-Amir emphasized that writing represents one of the most significant revolutions in human history. He cited an account by archaeologist Silvia Ferrara, who, during her visit to the Science and Technology Museum in Stockholm, observed 100 monuments featuring models of the most important inventions of the human mind, as determined by a museum poll. The wheel ranked first, electricity second, the telephone third, and the computer fourth, while writing ranked thirtieth. This surprised Ferrara and prompted her to write the book “The Greatest Invention” to highlight the status of writing in human history.

Al-Amir clarified that writing played a pivotal role in preserving sciences and history, managing knowledge, and safeguarding language. He noted that before its emergence, humanity lived in an era of oral culture, which relied on memorization, repetition, poetic narratives, speeches, proverbs, news, and genealogies to transmit knowledge across generations.

He explained that “the letter undergoes three stages in the human experience: first, mental and spiritual conception; second, articulation; and finally, writing, which gives the letter a more precise and coherent visual form.” He pointed out that the history of writing has undergone long stages of development, and discoveries in caves confirm the antiquity of human efforts to record thoughts and traces.

For his part, Salah Dibsha addressed writing in the digital transformation era, artificial intelligence as a tool for writers, human creativity in the face of machines, the ethics of AI-assisted writing, and the future of the Arab writer amid technological shifts, sharing personal insights and experiences.

He clarified that writers in the traditional paper-based environment rely on tangible tools and work at a relatively slower pace, with limited information sources that require greater effort to access. In contrast, the digital environment is characterized by speed of production, information availability, and ease of access. However, he stressed that the difference in tools has not changed the fundamental goal of writing, and some writers combine both environments according to their needs and methods.

Dibsha noted the potential benefits of using artificial intelligence in research, information gathering, providing critical feedback, translation, and spelling and grammar checking, while maintaining the writer’s presence and creative identity.

Regarding whether artificial intelligence can possess a “distinct literary voice,” he distinguished between voice and style, clarifying that while machines can mimic various literary styles, a literary voice is tied to a human’s position in the world, their body, memory, experiences, perceptions, and losses—factors that render voice deeper than mere linguistic features that can be simulated.

Speaking about human creativity in the face of machines, Dabsha affirmed that artificial intelligence is capable of producing compelling texts and may even surpass many human-written works artistically. However, this does not necessarily mean it possesses the ability to produce literature in its true sense, as it tends to reproduce the most common and frequently recurring patterns in the data on which it was trained.