In the portion above the paywall, Matt Johnson discusses Orwell’s career as we face an unending deluge of writing “assisted” by AI or even entirely created by AI:
In the introduction to his 1991 book Orwell: The Authorised Biography, Michael Shelden distinguishes his approach from that of Bernard Crick’s George Orwell: A Life, published a decade earlier. While Crick’s volume offered the most complete portrait of Orwell available at that point, Shelden argues that it’s too dull and impersonal — a flood of facts that bury Orwell’s singular, idiosyncratic personality. Shelden observes that Crick “relies heavily on the notion that facts speak for themselves if presented in enough detail”. So he attempts to provide a more intimate account of Orwell’s life: “A writer’s character and personal history influence what he writes and how he writes it. And the more we know about him, the better we are able to appreciate his work.” After all, “Books are not written by machines in sealed compartments”.
But we have now entered an era in which books can, in fact, be written by machines in sealed compartments. Large language models (LLMs) generate billions of words a day and are increasingly capable of producing long, structured, and sophisticated texts. While Orwell could not have foreseen the AI revolution, he predicted that synthetic text could someday replace human writing. In his 1946 essay “The Prevention of Literature”, he observes: “It would probably not be beyond human ingenuity to write books by machinery”. Although he doesn’t linger on this possibility, he laments the depersonalisation and mass production of writing already underway in the 1940s, and these arguments are just as applicable to AI-generated writing today.
Orwell expressed an almost eerie sensitivity to the ways in which literary ability — and even the quality of thought — can decline alongside a growing reliance on automated writing processes. For example, he cites radio features “commonly written by tired hacks to whom the subject and the manner of treatment are dictated beforehand”. The writing itself was “merely a kind of raw material to be chopped into shape by producers and censors”. His experience dealing with the pressures of working in a strictly controlled corporate environment at the BBC during wartime undoubtedly left him with this impression. He also cites “innumerable books and pamphlets commissioned by government departments” created in the same industrial manner.
Orwell’s scrutiny of the “machine-like” creation of “short stories, serials, and poems for the very cheap magazines” holds up particularly well today. In an uncanny anticipation of the process by which millions of users now produce creative content with AI, he writes:
Papers such as the Writer abound with advertisements of Literary Schools, all of them offering you readymade plots at a few shillings a time. Some, together with the plot, supply the opening and closing sentences of each chapter. Others furnish you with a sort of algebraical formula by the use of which you can construct your plots for yourself. Others offer packs of cards marked with characters and situations, which have only to be shuffled and dealt in order to produce ingenious stories automatically.
“The Prevention of Literature” was published around the time Orwell began work on Nineteen Eighty-Four, and it shows. Winston Smith’s job in the Ministry of Truth is to rewrite historical documents to match Party propaganda. He deletes “unpersons” from old news stories and ensures that recorded events always line up with the latest party line, all with the help of his speakwrite dictation machine. He dumps original documents into the Memory Hole for incineration. In the essay, Orwell moves from a discussion of increasingly robotic forms of literary production to the role this shift could play in a totalitarian state:
It is probably in some such way that the literature of a totalitarian society would be produced, if literature were still felt to be necessary. Imagination — even consciousness, so far as possible — would be eliminated from the process of writing. Books would be planned in their broad lines by bureaucrats, and would pass through so many hands that when finished they would be no more an individual product than a Ford car at the end of the assembly line.
In some ways, Orwell’s bleak prophecies would turn out to be more accurate than he could have imagined. The idea that human thought would be replaced by an “algebraical formula” and that consciousness would be eliminated from the writing process is now a reality on a vast scale (though the question of whether consciousness will emerge from AI systems remains open). But Orwell filtered his predictions about the future of writing through his fixation on state power and the possible emergence of a “rigidly totalitarian society”, and this led him astray. In such a society, Orwell assumed that “novels and stories will be completely superseded by film and radio productions”. To the extent that people would want to keep reading, “perhaps some kind of low-grade sensational fiction will survive, produced by a sort of conveyor-belt process that reduces human initiative to the minimum”. He concluded: “It goes without saying that anything so produced would be rubbish”.
