{"id":738,"date":"2026-07-05T06:12:37","date_gmt":"2026-07-05T06:12:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blog.adlington.fr\/index.php\/2026\/07\/05\/how-ai-is-changing-language-books-the-guardian\/"},"modified":"2026-07-05T06:12:37","modified_gmt":"2026-07-05T06:12:37","slug":"how-ai-is-changing-language-books-the-guardian","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.adlington.fr\/index.php\/2026\/07\/05\/how-ai-is-changing-language-books-the-guardian\/","title":{"rendered":"How AI is changing language | Books | The Guardian"},"content":{"rendered":"<blockquote><p>One way to think of language, he says, is as a series of layers, with words at the bottom followed by phrases, clauses, compound sentences, all the way up to narrative structure. \u201cAI is really good at the lower levels. It\u2019s learned lots of our syntactic structures and so everything looks well formed and grammatical. But, the higher up you go, the less good it is.\u201d The arc of a story is particularly hard for AI to get convincingly right.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cIf you\u2019ve got an AI to write a narrative, it can do a pretty good job of having a sequence of events and something happen at the end. But it wouldn\u2019t be a very tellable narrative,\u201d he continues. \u201cNothing startling or interesting would happen. And if there is anything startling, it will generally look like a mistake, rather than a brilliant twist.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>The secret sauce of great writing remains secret \u2013 even to the academics who study it. \u201cLinguists don\u2019t understand, really, how language works at its higher levels,\u201d at the level of discourse, storytelling, enchantment. \u201cWe can\u2019t build a machine to do something when we don\u2019t know how it works.\u201d We do have some idea of what it might boil down to \u2013 and that\u2019s our fundamentally social natures and, tied in with that, the fact that we are \u201cwetware\u201d \u2013 human flesh, with its spikes of adrenaline, rushes of dopamine, craving for social contact, all of which find expression in language\u2019s structure and the way we use it.<br \/>\n\u2014 Read on <a href=\"https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/books\/ng-interactive\/2026\/jul\/04\/future-of-fiction-next-great-novel-ai-language-chat-gpt\">www.theguardian.com\/books\/ng-interactive\/2026\/jul\/04\/future-of-fiction-next-great-novel-ai-language-chat-gpt<\/a><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>One way to think of language, he says, is as a series of layers, with words at the bottom followed by phrases, clauses, compound sentences, all the way up to narrative structure. \u201cAI is really good at the lower levels. It\u2019s learned lots of our syntactic structures and so everything looks well formed and grammatical. [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[5,7,47,6],"class_list":["post-738","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog","tag-ai","tag-consciousness","tag-language","tag-writing"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.adlington.fr\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/738","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.adlington.fr\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.adlington.fr\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.adlington.fr\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.adlington.fr\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=738"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.adlington.fr\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/738\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.adlington.fr\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=738"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.adlington.fr\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=738"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.adlington.fr\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=738"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}