Who Wrote This?: How AI and the Lure of Efficiency Threaten Human Writing by Naomi Baron (review)

Who Wrote This? is Naomi Baron’s latest book exploring the emergence of AI language models and their potential implications for writing. A linguist, educator, and emeritus professor at American University, Baron should be well placed to tease out the nuances of language, showcase the creativity of human literary canon across history, and deliver a set of findings and recommendations informed by deep experience. Indeed, since the release of ChatGPT in November 2022, there is a hunger for this kind of expertise and guidance both inside and outside academia, as the deluge of debates, panels, and forums in the past year have attested. This is the perfect storm, one that should be harnessed by a linguist with two decades of work on digital writing and reading into a powerful book. Instead, the reader must wade through a morass of truisms, historical anecdotes, and wiki-like summaries of research studies, interspersed with surface-level ponderings.