I love diaries — physical, bound paper books filled with handwriting — more and more as the digital has taken over so much of our lives. I have an existential terror of losing my human coherence, my voice, to the chatbot. Human thought, expression and experience are being commodified, thrown into a blender that spits out clichés and other slop.
A.I. models regularly steal artists’ and writers’ work (and just about everything else) to train their newest regurgitation machines. Almost anything online is at risk of this, and that makes the physicality of diaries a defense. If we have any chance of preserving the human voice against the chatbot — of rejecting not just artificial intelligence as the supreme writer, but also refusing to have our own writing contribute to training A.I. — it’s going to be through the pen and humble notebook. It’s going to be, for most of us, through diaries.
Diaries are uniquely suited to preserving our individual lives and imaginations. In Greek, “diary” is “ephemeris.” The mode itself is ephemeral — catching life’s fleeting moments like butterflies without a net. It’s something a chatbot can’t do for us, because it cannot truly think for us, perceive for us or exist through the tender human senses. A diary is the place to express what you think about the world — a safe hold of memory and some of our deepest human feelings. There’s no way this form of thinking could ever truly be replaced by A.I.
I found a diary abandoned in a shoe box at a Manhattan Mini Storage down the street from my apartment a few years ago. It was a window into another person’s being, something I wouldn’t have gotten any other way. Alongside a pair of emerald platform heels, the box held not a neat, red-bound volume secured by a tiny lock, but loose pages, torn from a notebook. Written in olive ink.
The writer had left a kind of manifesto. “I am going to do this the proper way, the way people do, and see if in some inadvertent way, there will be some biological effect that will happen,” he or she wrote. The goal was “not to write as if meant to be read.” Instead, for the writer, a diary was meant “to conjure an imaginary community of readers and philosophers.” The diarist told me: “The mind of many is better. Even if imagined.”
I found myself nodding and gripping my pen as if we diarists were one. I read lines about drawing a self-portrait in front of the bathroom mirror, lines about wielding a pen like a wand. “It’s something that immediately starts my brain in a conquest for more knowledge.”
By the time the diarist name-dropped Eugène Delacroix, the bohemian artist (and diarist) known for his painting “Liberty Leading the People,” I was already thinking of revolution. Together, diarists form a sort of universal underground, writing with pen and paper and refusing the siren call of the digital and the threat of censorship inherent in large language models. Diaries have always been historical tools, as enduring human papers provide testimony against threatening power structures. What would our collective memory be without Anne Frank’s missives to Kitty? Even George Orwell’s “Nineteen Eighty-Four” begins with the protagonist Winston Smith writing in a diary he bought at a junk shop — an offense punishable by death.
A physical diary is a space for deep reflection. The phone, by contrast, has become a catchall, taking over the role of diary, library, friend (and many other things) while also trimming your prospects, locking you out of your mind. A physical diary, by contrast, doesn’t fog brains, numb fingers, snitch or profit through you secondhand. It’s yours alone — beyond the reach of any mining for training data by A.I. companies or optimization by apps.
A.I. systems constantly take writers’ and artists’ work to train their models, almost always without compensation. The creepy-crawly spiders trawl the web for everything — so save the human voice where they cannot reach it, offline. One of the reasons writing in a diary is such trusty ammo against the chatbot is that it lives on paper where it can’t be tampered with, updated, filtered, shined or poached by robot tentacles. Yes, it’s vulnerable to fire, to rain — to all those dangers physical things can succumb to. But it isn’t at risk of accidentally being wiped, or of being digitally pilfered. Memory and meaning don’t melt “into mist,” as Orwell put it. Sometimes, a key and a burial deep in the sock drawer are better safeguards than a password and two-factor authentication.
“The habit of writing thus for my own eye only is good practice,” Virginia Woolf noted in a diary entry on April 20, 1919. “What sort of diary should I like mine to be? Something loose knit, and yet not slovenly, so elastic that it will embrace anything, solemn, slight or beautiful that comes into my mind.” She wanted a diary that was “some deep old desk, or capacious hold-all, in which one flings a mass of odds and ends without looking them through.” The purpose was to return, finding that “the collection had sorted itself and refined itself and coalesced.”
Preserving a lack of structure, the half-formed thoughts, was, for Woolf, the point. “The advantage of the method is that it sweeps up accidentally several stray matters which I should exclude if I hesitated, but which are the diamonds of the dustheap,” she wrote.
When we enter our thoughts into the cheerfully cutthroat editor of a chat log, we lose those little jewels — rebellious seeds and unscripted critiques that not everything of the day is morally acceptable, semantically copacetic, or in our best interests as complex and spontaneous human beings. I can only imagine what treasures of selfhood are sucked into the chatbots’ vacuum bags.
It’s why the physical, the book saved in a hard copy rather than in the cloud, is critical, conserving what Ray Bradbury termed “mind-as-printed-upon-matter.” Consider the epigraph to “Fahrenheit 451”: “If they give you ruled paper, write the other way.” How many blogs and personal histories have been lost to server error or simple deletion? It’s what makes a diary revolutionary — especially as computers curate memories and “upgrade” us. When you sit down with a physical notebook, you realize the world is open and free. The future has yet to be written.
To keep a diary is both a way to dig into yourself and a means to express yourself, without constraint. Think about why so many people prefer listening to vinyl records. There is something resonant — and liberating — about the human voice on analog. Turning to a diary — years after composition — is one of the few reliable ways to consult our pasts. So raise your pen, and make your mark — even if you are your only reader, or leave your notes for another to find.
Lily Koppel is the author of “The Red Leather Diary: Reclaiming a Life Through the Pages of a Lost Journal” and “The Astronaut Wives Club.”
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