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@ Totally Human Writer
2025-04-22 07:47:07In 1997, an IBM supercomputer beat the sport’s greatest mind. Deep Blue II became the first machine to defeat a chess world champion — Garry Kasparov. Humans would never win at chess again.
But if computers have been better than us for so long, why do we still play chess? Don’t we always play to win?
Well, even though we’re unlikely to record a victory over the machines, chess has become more popular than ever. According to a June 2023 PBS feature, subscriptions to chess clubs have soared and earlier this year chess.com servers overloaded due to a the highest number of active users ever.
This is not just a fad based on The Queen’s Gambit (a 2020 Netflix adaptation). Over 100m people have registered on chess.com since then, and books, YouTube channels and other content is flourishing. A Grandmaster recently visited the city in Spain where I live, and thousands of people came to watch her play.
Here’s my theory behind the recent revival of chess. The answer to why we still play is what’s behind the game of chess — strategy and spatial recognition.
It’s a system of training ourselves to appreciate cause and consequence, to improve our decision making. The best players train against computers, knowing they can’t win, but they can learn.
The same is true with today’s writing landscape. Professionals are panicking that machines will produce most of the content we’ll read from now on. Writing will change — that’s true. AI can write faster and more (grammatically) accurately.
But what’s behind writing? 🧠 Patterns of structured thought 🗣️ Sound rhetoric 🖊️ The creativity of language 📚 The beauty of stories.
Writing is a skill that we still need to train.
If we don’t, how will we know what makes our words effective? How will we communicate? How will we make sense of our past?
We can use AI to help, but the words it processes belong to us.
Just as we have recognised the importance of the concepts behind chess, we must do the same for the process of writing.