Lyricists and AI: between writing well and writing to the heart

Lately I’ve been thinking about a question: are people who express themselves better also more likely to use AI well?

Following that question further, a somewhat opposite one came up.

Today’s AI is actually already very good at expressing things.

Ask it to write about heartbreak, a line of comfort, find a metaphor, then ask for “a bit more restraint,” “not so cliché,” “more literary,” and it can usually hand over a decent version.

But listening again to Lin Xi’s and Wyman Wong’s lyrics lately, I still feel a very obvious difference.

Some lines written twenty or thirty years ago still suddenly hit you when you hear them today; while a lot of what AI writes, though fluent, pretty and complete in meaning, often just leaves me feeling after reading it:

hm, that’s quite right.

And then nothing more.

I started wondering what exactly the gap is.

On the same “can’t have,” AI explains, while Lin Xi leaves a mountain

To express “I really liked someone, but finally understood I can’t have them,” the most natural approach is usually to explain the principle.

Some people come into your life not necessarily to stay; loving someone also means learning to accept losing them.

None of that is wrong; it may even be quite accurate.

But “Under Mount Fuji” isn’t written that way.

Lin Xi places a relationship beside Mount Fuji, and so the very private emotion of “because I love so much, I want to possess” suddenly gets a concrete and slightly absurd point of comparison:

we can love a mountain that much without ever thinking it should belong to us.

What’s really impressive here doesn’t seem to be “a pretty metaphor.”

It’s that from then on, “being unable to possess” has a shape.

He doesn’t step forward to explain what letting go means; he finds something concrete enough, and lets the meaning stay there by itself.

I think this is exactly the opposite of a very common way AI expresses things.

AI is very good at explaining an emotion accurately; good writers sometimes aren’t in any hurry to explain at all, and instead find for it something we’ll still remember later.

On the same “growing up,” Wyman Wong lets a grape speak for itself

Now think about “after some loss, a person slowly matures.”

It’s actually especially easy to write as a correct sentence:

growing up takes time, regrets eventually become answers, many things can’t be rushed.

The problem with these expressions isn’t that they’re wrong, but that we’re already too familiar with them.

“When the Grapes Ripen” chooses a grape instead.

A grape ripening is itself a process that takes waiting and can’t be hurried.

Time is no longer just a principle spoken in the lyrics; it already exists in the thing itself.

So big words like “waiting,” “missing out” and “maturing” don’t need explaining one by one.

They’re all hidden in the relationship between the grape and time.

I really like this kind of expression, because the reader isn’t told “you should understand growing up from this”; they walk there themselves.

Being told the answer by someone else and suddenly seeing the answer yourself feel different.

By “Exaggerated,” even “not being dignified” becomes important

There’s another kind of difference I realized while rethinking “Exaggerated.”

If you asked AI today to write about “someone who has gone unseen for a long time,” it would easily handle this person quite maturely:

I don’t have to be the center of the crowd; I just occasionally hope someone truly sees me.

Very reasonable, and very healthy.

But real people aren’t always that healthy.

The person in “Exaggerated,” after being ignored, doesn’t quietly reach self-reconciliation, but gets more and more over the top. Since nobody looks at their ordinary self, they may as well become strange, glaring, even out of control — whatever it takes, at least you finally see me.

This is also something I really like about Wyman Wong.

He’s often willing to keep the less attractive parts of a person: stubbornness, vanity, jealousy, refusing to accept it, pride, sulking. He doesn’t first tidy the emotion into something mature and dignified before allowing it into the work; he admits that people are sometimes just like this.

AI’s default expression, though, easily goes the other way.

It likes finding meaning for contradictions, making characters mature, and arranging some kind of understanding or reconciliation at the end.

But much of what really hits people is precisely not that dignified, and isn’t necessarily resolved.

Lin Xi and Wyman Wong aren’t the same kind of “moving” either

Of course, talking about the two together makes it easy to fall into another trap: insisting on summing each up as a fixed style.

I don’t think that’s necessary.

If I only describe my own feeling, Lin Xi often keeps chasing deeper into the emotion. A relationship, as he writes it, may turn into obsession, possession, self-deception, time, and finally even start touching questions like “why are people like this.”

So listening to his lyrics, a feeling sometimes suddenly surfaces:

so this is what actually hurts.

Wyman Wong often lets me see a very specific person first.

This person has a temper, dignity, and their own embarrassments. They’re never just an abstract “heartbroken person” or “lonely person”; they get heartbroken, jealous, sulky or put on a brave face in their own way.

That kind of being moved is more like:

so someone else knows these unflattering thoughts too.

Of course, this isn’t a line you can draw very clearly. Lin Xi has also written very vivid characters, and Wyman Wong can absolutely push a song toward big questions of life.

It’s just that they made me realize: “expressing well” has never had only one method.

So is what AI really lacks “feeling”?

At this point, it’s easy to reach a very romantic explanation:

because AI has never really loved anyone, or had its heart broken, it can never write things like this.

I don’t quite believe the problem is that simple.

Today’s language models learn from an enormous amount of human writing; they’ve certainly seen countless expressions of love, loss, jealousy, loneliness and death. Often they can even call up more quickly than we can which words, images and sentence patterns go with a given emotion.

The problem may lie precisely there.

When we say “write about growing up for me,” it easily heads down paths that have already been proven effective again and again: time, scars, journeys, farewells, transformation, regret.

The result usually isn’t too bad.

But what’s really hard is the next step.

• Why a grape, of all things, and not something else?
• Why should this person’s mess be kept here, instead of helping them reach reconciliation?
• Why is this line enough as it is, when one more sentence of explanation would ruin it?

In these choices there’s experience, observation, taste, and a very particular view of the world.

Finally, one more very important thing is needed:

choosing.

AI can give me twenty lines at once, but which one should stay?

I increasingly feel this may be one real change in writing in the AI era.

Producing language is getting cheap fast.

Unhappy with a title, get twenty more; a sentence not good enough, get five versions at once; an email you don’t even have to start writing from the first line yourself.

As language becomes more and more abundant, what’s scarce has slowly changed places.

It’s not “can I write one more line,” but:

• of these twenty lines, which one is actually worth keeping?
• which metaphor only looks clever but is actually cliché?
• where has it explained too much?
• which word is less fancy but more precise?
• and is it even possible that nothing more should be added here?

AI can of course keep helping us make these judgments too.

But judgment doesn’t automatically get easier because generation gets cheaper.

That’s also why I increasingly feel that behind good expression there isn’t only language ability.

It also comes from what a person has seen, how they understand what they’ve seen, and how many of those “also pretty good” options they’re willing to give up, to keep only this one line in the end.

Between writing well and writing to the heart

So back to the original question.

Are people who express themselves better more likely to use AI well?

I still think so. But if “expressing yourself” is understood only as being better at choosing words and building sentences, that may be thinking of it too narrowly.

What really matters may also include: whether you have your own observations, whether you can judge if an answer is merely correct or genuinely interesting, whether you can tolerate some untidied complexity and embarrassment, and whether, facing ten answers from AI that are all “pretty good,” you have the nerve to delete nine of them.

AI is getting better and better at writing.

That probably won’t go backwards, and it will write even better in the future.

So I don’t want to prove “AI can never write Lin Xi or Wyman Wong.” That’s too easy, and too romantic, a conclusion.

What really makes me curious is something else:

once “writing a decent line” gets easier and easier, what will keep a line belonging to one particular person?

Maybe it’s the way they see the world, their experiences and biases, the less dignified parts, the things they can’t bear to delete, and also the things they finally decide to delete.

Between writing well and writing to the heart, there are probably still these.

There’s Mount Fuji, a slowly ripening grape, and a person desperately trying to get others to see them.