March 6th 2025

Nobody Watches Computers Play Chess

It may be more accurate to say that almost nobody watches computers play chess, but the point stands. When chess experienced a boom in its popularity online in 2020, it wasn't because Stockfish was doing a stadium tour. Fans wanted to see Magnus. They tuned in to watch Hikaru. IBM's Deep Blue super computer had taken two games and drawn three against Garry Kasparov in 1997. What remained interesting was the human point of view on either side of the board.

The same has proven true of more physical sports, to a more complicated extent. Between 2014 and 2023, the world record for the marathon fell from 2:03:38 to 2:00:35, which was a more precipitous drop than that from 1999 to 2014. The reason? Advances in carbon-fiber and foam technologies used in running shoes' midsoles.

There has been some debate about “super shoes" at the highest levels of competition. For its part, the World Athletic Association has passed multiple new rules. They have even banned shoes that “contain more than one rigid embedded plate or blade." Although litigation will continue in the running world, no one argues that runners should go barefoot at their meets.

From these examples, we can discern that there is some uncertain boundary between technology-assisted human performance that remains interesting and that which doesn't. It seems to some degree that when machines take over too much, we perceive them as distinct entities. At the same time that there is no expectation for runners to go barefoot, there is no expectation for “the fastest man alive" to prove himself against every would-be challenger in a car.

Put another way, auto racing didn't supplant foot racing. It became its own thing.

Me (3rd from left) running the 2015 Runner's World Half Marathon, which surely would have attracted an audience no matter the shoes we all wore.

Lee Sedol chose, three years after DeepMind's AlphaGo system bested him in Go, to retire from the game that he had once dominated. He explained his decision: “With the debut of AI in Go games, I've realized that I'm not at the top even if I become the number one through frantic efforts. Even if I become the number one, there is an entity that cannot be defeated."

Others, of course, continue to play. Although Netflix distributed the AlphaGo movie to wide acclaim, competitive play of the game itself, like chess and foot racing, remains strictly human.

There are many conclusions we may draw from all this. Perhaps the drama that we want to watch unfold – of I against it – begins to lose its character if the machine seems to overwhelm the human's presence. This interplay can be observed in chess, in athletics, in cooking, in carpentry, in art, and in writing. The machine's output may be identical and in some respects superior. It's different, though. Even though I can't see the multiple blades in the errant runner's shoes, they're there and the World Athletic Association tells me that's cheating, and I work their expert decision into my judgment of the race's outcome.

Sometimes a machine's output is so valuable that it overwhelms not just the human's presence, but any human's presence. (As a thought experiment, imagine a 2016 world in which the economy's function relied on Lee Sedol winning any-challenger Go tournaments.)

Undoubtedly in the near future there will be a blockbuster film that humans will play almost no role in writing. Wherever we set the bar for quality, artificial intelligence will surpass it. The most titillating plot, the most engrossing characters: these are things that machines will master and, if allowed, seize as their own domain.

What is less certain, though, is whether or not we will in our lifetime consider an AI-generated screenplay a classic. (Does "auteur theory" win out? Or was it all along just a matter of hitting the right notes at the right times?) That is the part that we get to decide, because we get to choose the context in which we put these things. We can decide that, in the same way chess computers are inarguably overpowering to human players, and simultaneously, less interesting to us than the human players themselves are, the most highly engaging and technically perfect generated works are separate from the writing that is our own.

Take this into account: you are living through your own progenitors' distant history, many aspects of which will become mythological to them. I believe that someday someone will look back and wonder how it ever was that the distinction between writing done by a human and writing generated by a machine had become temporarily blurred. The differences between human writing and generated writing, to these people who will have always known them both, will seem obvious.

In April, I'm releasing the debut issue of The Human Worker, a review that collects writing done with the Humthentication (human+authentication) tool I've built for iTypedMyPaper. Submissions are open!