Wrestling and Fretting

Rand Richards Cooper’s “Humanity on the Page” (May 2026) was a joy to read. It woke me up, flicked on multiple lights, and reminded me what writing used to be. So much of what I read these days is tedious. Even in good magazines and newspapers, the deadly virus is everywhere: the predictable short sentences, standard cadences, overused yet still so emphatic phrasings. There is nothing to inspire.

Cooper’s essay, on the other hand, made me sit up straight, laugh out loud, and demand of my husband that he read it too. I sent the link to my children and made copies to share with friends.

But it’s not just that Cooper writes so well. He also thought the thoughts that he expressed. He wrestled them into prose and committed them to the page. Those ideas belong to him. What we got to read was the culmination of a long process of which he is a master.

As ChatGPT gets better at producing (in seventeen seconds) what it thinks we want to say, we will get stupider. No longer required to puzzle things out with repeated drafts, edits, and further reading, our plagiarized works will reveal us as frauds the moment we try to have a discussion with anyone even semi-expert on our supposed “subject.”

But by then, most likely, there will be no experts and, please God, no conversations. Content with “sharing our thoughts” on LinkedIn and X, we can bask in our own irrelevance, our tales told by ChatGPT idiots, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

Jo Chopra McGowan
Dehradun, India

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The Deepest Question

I found Rand Richards Cooper’s article excellent. As someone for whom writing is important, I appreciate the ways that AI can be appealing to the writer. Cooper does a good job of exploring the “slippery slope” of AI use as we use it to replace more of the labor—and the personal stories that occur in the midst of that labor—that, over the course of a lived human life, results in the writer’s words. David Baldacci’s point is a good one that what’s at stake is the writer’s own imagination.

The article did a good job of getting to the deepest question with generative AI: In what ways might we allow its use to harm the exercise and development of those gifts and capacities that are unique to our humanity?

I also appreciate knowing that Commonweal has taken the editorial position of having only non-AI-assisted articles. I’ll be curious to see over time the differences between publications with and without AI “coauthorship”—and more than just the technical differences in the writing. We might see differences in the content, character, and culture of those publications and their contributors.

Chris Goodwin
Washington D.C.

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Too Much Ownerism, or Too Little?

I appreciated Ian Marcus Corbin’s evergreen exhortation (“The Ownerist Society,” June 2026) against an “ownerist society,” one “hellbent on mere, raw, dumb, infinite accumulation, rather than the good of the household or the broader community.” As he shows well, the organization of American life around ownership culture is neither universal nor inevitable—and can often be corrosive to our sense of belonging.

At the same time, I might caution that far from being obsessed with ownership, the majority of us have too easily ceded ownership over our livelihoods to “techno-feudalist” oligarchs bent on turning us into perpetual renters. Indeed, as a young person, I seem to “own” much less of my life than the generations before me: I have never owned a piece of music, don’t have any CDs or DVDs, keep dozens of my books on an e-reader platform that may not exist in a decade, and even store most of my documents on the nebulous “cloud”—not to mention that the median age of a first-time homebuyer is rapidly approaching forty. This is an equally, if not more, unnatural arrangement.

I take in stride Corbin’s warnings about a culture built around the autonomous individual’s right to construct walls around “their stuff,” but the right-to-repair movement, for instance, is about just that—vindicating our ownership rights against the prying hands of billionaires (and now trillionaires, too) seeking to extract their feudal rents. I wager that a left-liberal politics “inculturated” to our American context is capacious enough to tell a positive and even egalitarian story about ownership, too.

Stephen McNulty
Boston, Mass.