It is winter in California, so naturally, sunlight is pouring through the windows and the air is warm. Against a backdrop of spinning chairs and palm trees in the distance, with the light and shadow shading her face in perfect proportion, Emily Hsu ’24 M.S. ’25 looks like a Baroque painting. Except we are at Stanford, so let’s make it an AI rendition of what a Baroque painting should look like, circa the 21st century.
“I think technology is the antithesis of humanity,” Emily tells me. She looks me straight in the eyes when she says it. It surprises me. We are sitting in English 291, an advanced creative nonfiction class, just given a prompt to write a piece on investigative journalism. My subject? The arts, the maw of tech and Emily.
Emily is a computer science major on the human-computer interaction track — and I was preparing myself for a proclamation of the elegant way technology weaves human thought and philosophy, how we can see human genius even through something jagged and angular like hardware and natural language processing models. But there is no give in Emily’s eyes.
“If writing is the thesis of humanity, then technology is the antithesis,” she repeats. I push back a little.
“You don’t think there’s any way for technology to give space for human creativity and contribution?”
“There’s ways that technology empowers humans — like accessibility,” she replies. “But the direction of AI nowadays is to replace humans.” And just like that, Emily has given voice to a secret thought of my English major mind — that it’s true. The everlasting march of progress has evolved from increasing ease of labor to eliminating human contribution altogether. But writing, in all its defiance and inefficiency and slowness, seems to do the opposite.
Emily started writing at 7 years old, in her diary. Her love for journaling and the written word has stayed with her throughout her life, but she only decided to pursue a creative writing minor at Stanford in earnest after studying abroad in Florence. There, she says, she began to read stories again, the way she used to as a young girl — and they started to shift the way she thought. The power of stories, she realized, lay in changing people’s minds.
It was like hearing a mirror of myself speak. I’d experienced this. What was going to war on my sofa or crying over the loss of my friend, who had stabbed me in the ribs over and over again, if not changing my mind? Because those were my ribs. Change the situation or the story or the person — it doesn’t matter. They became mine the moment I opened the book.
From Emily’s perspective as a computer science student, the creative writing program at Stanford was excellent. “It works a different part of my brain,” she says. “And to me, it’s a way for me to make an impact on the world. People talk about technology making an impact on the world, but writing can influence how people see the world. And in this day and age of AI, it’s even more important. There’s something unique about human lived experiences that technology can’t replicate.”
It all goes back to that — human experience. When we break it down, human experience is uneconomical. It’s loud, and it’s harsh, and it’s wrong, in many ways, and it takes too long. It is the antithesis of technology.
Unfortunately — or, perhaps, fortunately — it seems to be the only thing that keeps us coming back to the ever-present need to express ourselves, the thing that we can’t seem to step away from. Writing. Art. We will always need to unravel it, hack at it, yell at it, weep over it. We will always need to know that other people are doing that, too. And, at least for now, and the rest of time, that does not seem to be going anywhere.