AI may be degrading language on the Internet

But it may be also democratizing access to expression

There is something melancholic in the thought that AI may be impoverishing language online. A recent study suggests that as AI-generated writing spreads across the internet, language itself may be becoming flatter, more repetitive, more sanitized, less alive. The complaint rings true. Anyone who spends enough time reading online can already sense the drift: smoother prose, more polished sentences, fewer surprises, less soul.

As a heavy user of AI for my own writing -especially since English is not my native language- I am guilty as charged.

And yet there is no point lying to ourselves. Cultural losses of this kind are usually unstoppable once a technology reaches a dramatic level of convenience.

The Church has seen this before. For centuries, the monastic scriptorium stood as a place of patience, discipline, beauty, and reverence. Monks copied texts by hand with care that was almost liturgical. Something precious was undeniably lost when the printing press made that world obsolete. A civilization of slow, crafted transmission gave way to speed, scale, and mass reproduction. But the press won because convenience won. And it did not win for trivial reasons. Books became cheaper, literacy spread, and access to knowledge broke out of older confines. A genuine loss was accompanied by a genuine gain.

I suspect AI and writing may prove to be something similar.

Yes, AI may degrade language in some ways. It may encourage shortcuts. It may reward formula over style, speed over struggle, fluency over depth. It may contribute to a culture in which fewer people learn how to write with force, precision, or beauty because the machine can do a passable version for them. That is not a small loss. Language matters because thought matters, and a culture that loses its feel for words often loses its feel for reality.

But IMHO, there is another side to this story, and it should not be dismissed. AI is also democratizing expression. Many people have something real to say but lack the technical writing skill to say it well. They have ideas, memories, convictions, insights, griefs, intuitions, and arguments trapped behind clumsy prose. AI can sometimes help bridge that gap. It can help a person express an idea that otherwise would have remained buried, not because the idea was empty, but because the craft was missing.

That is where a Catholic perspective should be both sober and hopeful. We should be sober enough to admit that convenience nearly always alters culture, and usually not without cost. The old scriptoria do not come back. The disciplines that technologies displace are rarely recovered in full. But we should also be hopeful enough to see that not every loss comes without compensation. A tool that weakens some forms of craftsmanship may also widen participation in the world of expression. It may make it easier for more human beings to speak.

So the question is not whether AI will preserve the old literary order intact. It will not. The question is whether we will still care enough about truth, beauty, and human depth to resist letting convenience become our only standard. If we do, then AI may serve as a tool without becoming a tyrant. It may help more people find words, even if it also tempts us to use them cheaply.

That, perhaps, is the strange consolation. The monastic scriptorium died, but the written word did not. Something like that may happen again. Language online may grow thinner in some places. But the ability to express an idea may also be placed in the hands of many who never had it before. And that, too, is no small thing.