August 19, 2025 // Perspective

AI and the Writing Soul

Molly Jo Rose

First, let me acknowledge that writing is difficult. As both a writer and writing instructor, I am acutely aware of how painful it is to give birth to an idea and articulate it in a way that allows us to be understood. There is a real struggle in finding just the right words and organizing those words into sentences that build arguments with well-considered support. But the truth is that the better we write, the better we think. The act of writing is the act of organized thinking. It is the mind using the tool of language to express the otherwise ineffable and silent soul. If we allow the AI of Large Language Models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT to remove the challenges of articulation for us, we lose an essential part of ourselves. Elie Wiesel said, “I write to understand as much as I write to be understood.” Writing is discovery and connection. It is an intense exploration of the limits of language that helps us to better understand ourselves and how we feel about the world.

Writing wrestles down what makes our minds restless. LLMs cannot wrestle, discover, think, or help us connect. There is a reason writers and writing teachers find AI-generated writing robotic and soulless. It is. LLMs are merely complex algorithm programs that regurgitate aggregated responses to a prompt. They do not have the capacity to reach the space where the soul and words connect, where who we are reaches greater fullness through the expression of language.

The modern brain was significantly altered when it learned to read, and it goes through more significant changes as it advances in ability to write, creating new synapses and circuitry that makes us higher functioning humans. These pathways are deep networks that thread the soul and the brain and make the miracle of connection possible, but this whole endeavor is dependent on our facility with written language.

The fathers and mothers of the Church relied on this networking as they wrote toward an understanding of Christ that is still available today because it was written down. It wasn’t AI that participated in their writing but Christ, the creator who breathed soul into us. Surely the Gospel writers had moments of anguish as they hunted for the right nuanced language to express what God was asking them to say. Surely their original manuscripts were full of crossed out words and arrows indicating sentences should be pulled up or down into the right cushion of text where His inspiration would be heard most resoundingly. But that struggle was necessary for us to have the slightest chance of knowing God in the ways they did. His whisper is in all their choices.

I know when I write that God is participating. There is no arrogance to that observation. Instead, there is a great humility and joy of service. I pray to find Him at the end of every sentence, pulling and turning my writing toward His greater purpose. If I used an LLM, I would be eliminating not only the critical thought process of discovery but any opportunity for collaboration with Christ. The soul is muffled in an LLM transaction and given no chance to be heard when an algorithm so readily parrots a human voice and speaks for us.

The question is why are we so eager to surrender the act of writing to AI? When did we collectively decide a robot with an impressively complicated math equation could do better? I don’t want to receive AI-generated papers from students. I want to do what I have been called to do, which is to help students articulate their souls through language. I want my students to give God every chance to be at the end of their sentences, to pull them toward conclusions they never thought possible. I want them to struggle and get the grammar wrong and misuse words while they learn how to harness language and its connective power. I want them to give themselves a chance to discover the world and how they feel about it. In short, I want AI to go away, and I want our souls to stay and be heard.

AI-generated writing is more artificial than intelligent, but joyfully, we are not. We are unique and authentic, capable of greatness because we are made from a truly intelligent Maker, one who gave us souls and language and a relentless desire to understand and be understood. The choice to use all these gifts is ours, and the choice to walk away from things that impair our ability to know God and ourselves is ours, too. Just because something is easier doesn’t mean it’s better. There is purpose and reward to the struggle of writing. Its fruits are nothing short of a fuller understanding of ourselves and how God is calling us to participate in the world.

Molly Jo Rose is a writer and English professor living with her husband and three children in Fort Wayne, where they are parishioners at St. John the Baptist. She walks a lot and writes a little.