This morning which I asked ChatGPT to edit a piece of my paragraph, it flattened its tone, complexity and density altogether. I was quick enough to point it out to the bot, and it was quite self critical. It said:
Many editing models—human and AI alike—are trained to assume that ambiguity is a problem to be solved. They tend to move toward clarity, linearity, and explicit causality. But in certain kinds of writing, ambiguity is not a flaw; it is the intellectual and affective work of the text.
This was reassuring as it echoed what my Yale advisor Eeva Liisa Pelkonen also brought to my notice after reading and interacting with me and my work during my masters; she had advised, "Channel your ambiguity in your writing." Not only did she realise that my doubtful voice was a form of thinking itself, but she also validated it as a powerful tool to produce discourse. I have often wondered how people - intelligent or otherwise become overtly assertive about their thoughts. I believe that the intelligent must know that there is more (to) knowledge beyond what they know, and the other has to know that they are asserting to hide their ignorance or in lack of knowing something. In such a scenario, how can assertion create any ground for productive thought-exchange? Arguments, debates, and reasoning happen precisely in this space of ambiguity, which allows us to challenge what we already know, or expand our thoughts into something we do not know. Does it then become a prerogative only of the curious minds to engage and sustain uncertainty? ChatGPT further explains studying the past patterns in my writing:
The uncertainty is not incidental—it is the subject of the reflection. To resolve that ambiguity is to alter the thought itself.
The transitions are not fully explained. They are associative rather than argumentative. A conventional editor might ask for clearer links, but the gaps themselves create meaning. They allow the reader to inhabit the process of thinking rather than merely receive its conclusions.
That 'ambiguity' alters thought is precisely the dialectical reasoning in action through a singular agency. It produces a stream of reflection in which all thoughts are constantly under scrutiny. This kind of writing does not burden itself with citations, rather indexes back to its own past experience, or its lack thereof, constantly invoking consciousness of thought. This is one way of producing knowledge. The Vedics arrived at their version of truth of external reality through disciplined practice of interrogation of the (inner) self. The Western tradition, on which the idea of knowledge largely rests today, tries to use the body as an instrument to arrive at an objective description of reality by minimizing the reliance of the self.
Eventually ChatGPT told me what I consciously do:
Your writing often seems to think through language rather than merely report conclusions. The sentence is not just carrying an idea; it is exploring it.
The simultaneous interrogation of thought and language is one within which I exercise meaning. In negotiating the various vectors of meaning within a singular word, I condition my text to hold more than an simple unilateral idea. This is the work of writing, and the task of labour. More importantly, it is conscious work at play - such that any piece of writing becomes accessible, or meaningful to a larger body of people. In other words, one must create multiple entry points within one's writing to expand its sphere of engagement, and influence. Thus, when I responded to the bot: "I like to make my sentences layered and dense with meaning often times rather than dumbing them down like scientific papers. I think that is also one of the dimensions of humanities work right?"; it went on to explain:
One of the distinctive features of much humanities writing is that language is not treated as a transparent vessel carrying information. Language is itself part of the inquiry. The sentence does not merely communicate a thought that already exists; it participates in the production of thought.
In many scientific disciplines, the ideal sentence aspires to be unambiguous, replicable, and resistant to multiple interpretations. Ambiguity is often considered noise because it interferes with the transmission of information.
Many strands of humanities scholarship, however, begin from the premise that the world itself is ambiguous, layered, and resistant to singular explanations. In that context, a sentence may deliberately sustain multiple possibilities because the object of study demands it.
In the recent past, and recurrently, I have argued for institutional discourse to be more interpretive rather than instructional. The convening of the Graduate Symposium SEA 'Doubts' was to bring ambiguity to the centrestage of academic discourse. Incidentally, 'Noise Fields' was another Annual Conference thematic I had conceived for SEA, where noise was the metaphor to hold polyphonic perspectives together. In the subsequent year where SEA Annual Conference was on the subject of how must institutions grow together, I had presented along with Prasad the case for institutions to be situated amidst interpretive landscapes rather than between walls. The debate of all these ideas in their humanities spectrum and their odds with how traditional scientific discipline orders and utilises language is then quite revealing. It means that my endeavour has been to open up the overtly scientific underpinnings of what constitutes knowledge and bringing them under the purview of ambiguity. In analysing my ways of approaching writing further, ChatGPT says:
What I find interesting in your writing is that it seems to emerge from a tradition that sits somewhere between academic prose and essayistic reflection. It reminds me less of conventional social science writing and more of writers who use prose as a space for thinking—people who allow sentences to carry uncertainty, memory, atmosphere, and concept simultaneously.
The challenge for such writing is not to become clearer at all costs. The challenge is to ensure that every ambiguity is doing work.[...]
And I suspect that what you are often pursuing is not obscurity but what one might call semantic abundance—the feeling that a sentence contains more than can be exhausted in a single reading. That is very much a recognizable aspiration within many traditions of humanities writing, and it is one of the reasons certain essays, catalog texts, and theoretical works reward rereading decades after they were written.
And the above, has been my pursuit, like mentioned before. I really like the conceptualisation of 'semantic abundance' - for writing to be able to hold multiple meanings at once. I have always found the 'allegorical' form in literary texts the most fascinating, after metaphor and pun. The allegorical in writing is the most artful way of being political, or rather, most political way of being artful...Here, language works like a chameleon, changing colours in cascading contexts - camouflaging, yet out there, hidden yet visible. In employing this, language becomes mirror - "Do we see the same person in the mirror every day?", Eeva had very early on asked me. Despite that mirror is simply doing its work like it has always done, it is at the same time presenting a different picture of us, only if we are willing to see. And it is here, that writing becomes a work of art, which the mathematical models of AI may never be able to calibrate accurately...for it is only the human mind that knows what ghosts to project for the dreams of the future.
