Writing Implements

ABSTRACT: The archive and the tools with which we now write have definitively changed, particularly since the advent of large language models. Writing with computation now entails something beyond word processing or developing human-authored algorithms to produce otherwise intentional compositions. Since at least the beginning of the twenty-first century, writing has been changed more by the way authors relate to the archive than by direct computational intervention. We are closer to the database than to our libraries. The archive reaches us in a new form with large language models as its ultimate implementation. How writers relate to the archive is crucial. Transactions may be implementational or existential—the former, inevitable and potentially generative; the latter, profoundly misdirected.