Distant Writing: Time Travel to the Distant Future

A Short Introduction to Luciano Floridi

In the rapidly evolving world of artificial intelligence and digital technology, Luciano Floridi’s voice carries much philosophical weight and influence. As the architect of the philosophy of information and a leading authority on digital ethics, Floridi has reshaped how we conceptualize our relationship with information technologies and artificial intelligence. His recent paper on "Distant Writing"¹ represents the evolution of decades of groundbreaking work examining how human creativity and artificial intelligence can intertwine to create new forms of expression. Following this introduction. I want to focus some commentary on this paper.

Born in Rome in 1964, Luciano Floridi's academic journey has been marked by exceptional achievement and intellectual innovation. After studying philosophy at Rome University La Sapienza, he completed both an MPhil and PhD at the University of Warwick in quick succession, working under philosopher Susan Haack. His career has spanned institutions including Oxford University, the University of Hertfordshire, and the University of Bologna. Currently, he serves as the Founding Director of the Digital Ethics Center at Yale University and Professor in the Cognitive Science Program, positions he has held since 2023.

Floridi's vision is built around concepts that help us navigate the digital age. He introduced the concept of the "infosphere,” the informational environment encompassing both online and offline information, and argued that humans are best understood as "inforgs" (informational organisms) existing alongside other informational entities in this environment. In his book The Fourth Revolution (2014), Floridi positioned the information revolution as the fourth major shift in human self-understanding, following the Copernican, Darwinian, and Freudian revolutions (download the book here). This "fourth revolution" transforms how we understand humanity's place in the world, recasting us as informational entities in the broader infosphere.

His contributions to AI ethics have been equally significant. Floridi introduced the principle of "explicability" as a fifth core ethical principle for AI (alongside beneficence, non-maleficence, autonomy, and justice), insisting that AI systems must be both intelligible and accountable. His frameworks for AI governance, developed through initiatives like AI4People, have influenced policy approaches worldwide.

What is "Distant Writing"?

In traditional writing (what Floridi calls "close writing"), the author does everything: coming up with ideas, developing characters, crafting sentences, and polishing the final text. It's hands-on, direct work. Imagine if instead of writing a story word by word, you could just tell someone what kind of story you want, and they would write it for you. That's essentially what "distant writing" is, but with AI doing the actual writing.

With distant writing, the human becomes more of a designer or architect. As Floridi explains it:

"Distant writing refers to a literary creation practice wherein human authors function primarily as narrative designers, while LLMs based on Large Language Models (LLMs) perform the actual writing."

He makes a clear distinction between traditional authorship and this new approach, where "distant writing—also occasionally termed wrAIting [...] positions the author not as the direct textual producer, but as the architect of narrative possibilities, responsible for specifying requirements, affordances, and constraints, and curating the LLM-generated content." This shift in how we approach writing isn't entirely new. Floridi borrows from philosopher Vilém Flusser who predicted this transformation decades ago:

"His attitude [the poet's] to a poem is no longer that of the inspired and intuitive poet but that of an information designer... All our conceptions of poets favored by the muse must yield to a conception of the poet as a language technician. Poetry will be desanctified."

The key differences are in the process. Rather than sitting down to write directly, the author engages in what Floridi calls "a systematic interrogation: 'wrAIting' becomes the art of crafting targeted prompts that guide an LLM toward generating the desired narrative output." The quality of the writing depends on "the precision of these prompts—the correctness and accuracy of the Socratic maieutic² exercised by the authoritative designer to nudge and ultimately force the LLM to generate the desired output."

Unlike traditional writing, "distant writing operates through a logic of requirements rather than a logic of composition [emphasis added]." The author becomes more like a film director or architect, designing and specifying what should happen rather than creating each element directly. Floridi argues this doesn't replace human creativity but transforms and potentially expands it. It enables "narratives that would otherwise be impossible or difficult to achieve." For example, it allows authors to explore connections between different literary worlds or create what he calls "multiverse literature" that explores multiple possible paths of a story simultaneously.

This shift raises profound questions about the future of writing. Floridi speculates that:

"Looking forward, distant writing represents not just a novel approach to literary creation but potentially a fundamental shift in how written communication is produced more generally. One day, people may wonder how past generations could write all their texts without LLMs doing most of the work. They will look at writing a bit like we think about sewing our own clothes or growing our own vegetables: doable, but not an ordinary practice."

In the future, "Close writing might become an exceptional skill rather than the norm, comparable to home-baking bread in a world of mass-produced goods." This raises important questions about the relationship between language and thought which previous philosophical giants like Lev Vygotsky explored, and how our thinking processes might change when we're designing rather than directly composing our thoughts.

A New Hebbian Principle for Distant Writing

The original Hebbian principle in neuroscience, often simplified as "neurons that fire together, wire together," describes how neural pathways strengthen through repeated activation. In the current educational debate, learners are required to suffer through exercises and flashcards because they benefit from cognitive struggle. Every struggle entails the firing of neurological synapses with habituate and become more efficient and effective from practice.

In the context of distant writing, this principle suggests that AI as an artificial agent of a distant writer could over time allow traditional “memory” loops to atrophy while creating new loops to facilitate work between human prompting patterns and AI text generation, in the process generating new creative pathways. Just as neural connections strengthen through repeated activation, the skill of distant writing develops through the repeated pairing of specific prompting techniques with desired textual outcomes.

The human-AI creative relationship becomes a form of distributed cognition where prompting patterns and resulting texts co-evolve, creating a new kind of creative muscle memory that exists partly in human skill and partly in the human-AI interaction itself.

New Forms of Agency

A critical evolution in Floridi's thinking appears in his 2024 paper "AI as Agency without Intelligence" (download here) where he reframes AI systems not as possessing artificial intelligence but rather as demonstrating a new form of artificial agency without intelligence. This conceptual shift moves beyond debates about whether AI systems "truly understand" or "think" like humans, focusing instead on their capacity to act in meaningful ways despite lacking human-like intelligence.”

In this 2024 paper Floridi distinguishes between natural and artificial agents as follows. Unlike natural agents, artificial agents can modify their behavior under the direction of a specific goal. Unlike biological agents, they lack intentionality, evolutionary development, and are incapable of formulating their own goal, but they have rapid, domain-specific adaptation capabilities. They differ from social agents in their inability to form emotional bonds but excel in coordinated information processing. While more sophisticated than traditional artefactual agency through advanced learning capabilities, they fundamentally lack consciousness, intelligence, mental states, and cannot transcend predefined objectives through self-determination.

Artefactual agency refers to the capacity of human-made objects and systems to interact with their environment in ways defined by their design, exhibiting limited autonomy and adaptability. Unlike natural agents, artefactual agents have externally imposed purposes and operate through programmed behaviors and algorithmic processes. Examples include smart thermostats that monitor temperature, learn user preferences, and adjust HVAC systems accordingly; automated irrigation systems that regulate water flow based on soil moisture readings; traffic light controllers that adapt timing to traffic patterns; robotic vacuum cleaners that navigate rooms while avoiding obstacles; and programmable coffee makers that brew at predetermined times.

Ethical and Creative Implications of Distant Writing

As Floridi's concept of distant writing evolves from theoretical possibility to practical reality, we must begin to examine its profound implications even while for many of us these notions still seem like science fiction. It seems plausible that in a hundred years, if artificial agency becomes the norm, our brains will change to accommodate new information processing loops. While Floridi lays the groundwork, I'd like to extend his analysis by considering several dimensions he touches on but doesn't fully explore, at least not within my limited reading of his prolific work.

Redefining Authorship and Attribution

Floridi introduces the shift from writer to "authoritative designer," but this raises questions beyond his initial framing. When a human specifies requirements and an LLM generates the actual text, the traditional concept of authorship becomes inadequate. Floridi suggests the human becomes an "authoritative designer," but I believe this requires a more nuanced understanding than he currently offers.

Unlike traditional ghostwriting where human writers interpret direction, distant writing creates a fundamentally different collaborative relationship. The multiple iterations of prompting and regeneration create a feedback loop where the final text emerges from a process neither fully human nor fully machine. This goes beyond Floridi's discussion of "requirements versus composition" to the question of whether our entire legal and cultural framework for intellectual creation needs reconstruction.

Transforming Creative Possibilities

Building on Floridi's notion of "multiverse literature," I see even broader implications for creative expression. Where Floridi highlights how distant writing enables narratives that would be "impossible or difficult to achieve" through traditional means, I would argue this represents not just a quantitative shift in what's possible but a qualitative transformation of creativity itself. This possibility entails the need for a much more robust conceptual framework for creativity than I can put my hands on. In my view, mainstream education has always given short shrift to creativity in favor of logic and epistemology, and colleagues with whom I’ve worked over the years perceive teachers in the Arts as a sort of specialty, almost a luxury, and I worry that we don’t have the evidence base to support judgments about the core significance of creativity in logic, science, mathematics, and history.

By removing technical composition barriers, distant writing might democratize literary creation in ways Floridi hints at but doesn't fully articulate. His framework focuses primarily on professional writers adapting to new tools, but I see potential for entirely new categories of creators who can’t write themselves—people with rich ideas but without advanced writing skills who could produce sophisticated narratives through careful prompting. I also wonder about the potential for societal disruption when the most skilled distant writers learn to singlehandedly produce entire news organizations. This represents a more radical democratization than Floridi's analysis suggests.

Cultural and Cognitive Consequences

Floridi predicts that close writing might become "an exceptional skill rather than the norm," comparing it to home-baking bread. I want to push this analogy further and consider implications he doesn't directly address. Just as calculators transformed our relationship with mental arithmetic, distant writing could reshape our relationship with language more fundamentally than Floridi acknowledges. While he mentions the potential shift in writing practices, I'm particularly concerned with the cognitive impacts this might have. Drawing on Vygotsky's theories about language and thought (which Floridi references but doesn't deeply explore), I believe the transition from composers to designers of text could reshape not just human creativity, but basic cognition in both limiting and liberating ways.

If thinking and writing are intimately connected, as Vygotsky suggested, then a shift to “requirement-based” creation rather than direct composition might alter not just how we write, but how we think—a possibility that extends beyond Floridi's current analysis.

Professional and Educational Implications

Where Floridi's work tends to focus on philosophical frameworks rather than practical consequences, I see urgent questions for both professional writers and educators. For professionals, distant writing represents both opportunity and existential challenge beyond what Floridi has discussed. Will the market increasingly reward those who master prompt engineering over those who craft sentences directly? This creates tensions between traditional craft and new design skills that Floridi acknowledges but doesn't fully resolve. To be sure, I’m aware that we can’t expect Floridi to have all the answers, but we are obligated to address these forward-looking ideas that may not impact what teachers do this coming Monday, but could influence what they do on Monday, May 15, 2067.

In education—an area Floridi touches on only briefly—distant writing necessitates completely rethinking how we teach and evaluate language arts. Everything we believe traditionally about effective writing is built on the assumption that individual writers must generate their own thoughts and find their own ways to express those thoughts. Eductors now can track growth and development in both thinking and communicating and attribute it to individual improvement. If students can generate original, creative, interesting essays through prompting, assessment must evolve beyond Floridi's framework to measure prompt design, regulated agency, conceptual understanding, and design thinking rather than traditional composition skills.

Connecting to Floridi's Broader Framework

While these extensions go beyond Floridi's explicit arguments about distant writing, they connect naturally to his foundational concepts of the "infosphere" and humans as "inforgs." My analysis builds upon his insight that we increasingly function as information managers rather than information creators, suggesting that this transformation may be more profound and multidimensional than even his thoughtful work has yet explored.

In this light, distant writing becomes not just the technological possibility Floridi describes, but an existential inflection point that invites us to reconsider the relationship between human creativity, technological capability, and the future of expressive communication in ways that extend his already valuable contributions to the field. The Hebbian principle—neuron that fire together, wire together—the whole question of the impact of AI on human thinking with, about, and through language could over decades could face practices and strategies we can’t even conceive. In this time and place, we still have choices about how to educate children. This time and place demands that humans need to do their very best thinking with and without AI.

Three Discussion Questions for Readers

1. Creative Identity Question: How would your relationship with your own writing change if you shifted from being the direct composer of texts to being a "narrative designer" who primarily creates prompts for AI to compose? Would you feel a greater sense of creative freedom by focusing on high-level design, or would you experience a loss of connection to the craft of writing itself?

2. Cognitive Evolution Question: If Vygotsky was right that language shapes thought, how might our cognitive processes evolve over generations if "distant writing" becomes the norm? Can you imagine specific ways your children or grandchildren might think differently if they primarily design requirements for AI rather than composing text directly?

3. Educational Transformation Question: Schools currently teach writing as a fundamental skill for both communication and thinking. If distant writing becomes commonplace, what new skills should education prioritize instead? Should we focus on teaching prompt engineering, critical evaluation of AI-generated content, or perhaps double down on traditional writing as a specialized craft? What would you want your own children to learn?

1. Floridi, L. (2025). Distant Writing: Literary Production in the Age of Artificial Intelligence. Yale University, Digital Ethics Center & University of Bologna, Department of Legal Studies.

2. Socratic maieutic—the art of intellectual midwifery—represents one of philosophy's methods for knowledge acquisition. This approach doesn't view teaching as the direct transmission of knowledge from instructor to student, but as a process of helping others "give birth" to insights already latent within their minds. Like his mother Phaenarete who practiced physical midwifery, Socrates claimed to deliver not babies but ideas, facilitating the birth of knowledge through systematic questioning rather than didactic instruction.