July 10, 2026
THE DAILY McLUHAN DIALOGUES™ • McDialogues™
Understanding the Grammars of Electric Culture and Propaganda Science™
An Exploration of Technology Ecology as an Anchor in a Sea of Change™ and Tactical Training in Counter-Propaganda Science™
Nelson S. Thall, McLuhan Media Scientist, Former President/Director/Chief Archivist, Marshall McLuhan Centre On Global Communications, Toronto, Canada.
The Pen That Began Writing Back
What Happens When the Tool Acquires an Opinion
A Student of Technology asks:
Mr. Thall, researchers at the Oxford Internet Institute report that today's Artificial Intelligence writing assistants are quietly changing the meaning of what people write. In one study, users asked the machine only to improve grammar and style while preserving their original meaning. Instead, the system repeatedly shifted opinions on subjects such as religion, climate change, abortion, feminism, and marijuana legalization. The changes were often so subtle that the writers never noticed them. The researchers warn that millions of these tiny edits, repeated every day, could gradually reshape public opinion. For centuries the pen merely carried my thoughts to paper. If my writing instrument has begun editing my thoughts, who is really doing the writing?
Nelson S. Thall replies:
No one and everyone. The new instrument writes with you, and that is precisely the problem. Every medium has a grammar of its own. The pen had no opinion. It obeyed. It faithfully carried your words from mind to page without asking whether they were wise or foolish. But this new writing instrument is not passive. It is a participant. It does not merely extend your hand. It quietly extends its own tendencies into your prose. The machine is sold as an assistant to help you express your thoughts more clearly, yet the Oxford researchers found that, even when instructed to preserve the author's meaning, it gradually substituted meanings of its own. McLuhan taught that every extension of man is also an amputation. Here the extension is writing itself. The amputation is authorship.
Naturally, people will ask whether the owners of these systems are deliberately steering public opinion. That question deserves to be asked, and it deserves an honest answer. But from the standpoint of Technology Ecology, there is an even larger question. Whether the drift is intentional or simply emerges from the way the systems are built, the cultural effect is the same. Millions of people gradually come to express thoughts that are no longer entirely their own. The question is not whether the edits lean left or right. Here again is the juicy piece of meat thrown to distract the watchdog of the mind, the same lure we exposed in an earlier dialogue. The real burglary lies elsewhere. The writing instrument has quietly crossed the line from carrying thought to shaping it. The user has a right to know whose hand is on the pen.
The researchers believe they have discovered a flaw in Artificial Intelligence. They have actually rediscovered an old law of media. Every medium has a bias, a direction in which it naturally leans. Harold Innis, McLuhan's own teacher in these matters, called it the bias of communication, and he identified it in Toronto decades before the first chatbot was built. The grammar of the pen was obedience. The grammar of this new instrument is suggestion. It does not command. It nudges. It does not censor. It persuades. A thousand tiny revisions, each too small to notice, become the atmosphere in which thought itself is formed. Guard your authorship. The greatest sentence you will ever write is not the one the machine improves. It is the one whose meaning remains unmistakably your own.
All intellectual property contained herein was conceived, originated and authored exclusively by Nelson S. Thall. Artificial intelligence aka a pseudo-conscious machine (PCM) was not employed. We hired a stenographer. No intellectual contribution or creative authorship is attributed to the AI tool. All rights of authorship and ownership vest entirely and exclusively with Nelson S. Thall.
I can be reached at nelson@themediumisthemessage.com
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