Note:
I posted this Note as a response to an essay by maja on substack about whether or not to write with AI, and the layers of labour.
I continue to see writing—yourself—as the most direct way to sharpen your thinking. I find that the process of trying to articulate exactly what I mean sometimes feels like trying to catch an eel, slippery and frustrating. But that friction is part of the process of clarifying something to myself first, and then to others.
Our minds are constantly looking for the shortest way to take something from unknown to known, and so it naturally latches onto the first resolution it sees. When it sees an AI-recommended sentence, it is more prone to accepting it for the sheer reason that it cuts effort in half. But that’s also equally dangerous, because you slowly begin to lose the capacity to clarify exactly what you meant in the way you see it.
Writing is a way of communication, but it’s also a way of seeing, to borrow from John Berger: ‘We never look at just one thing; we are always looking at the relation between things and ourselves.” Writing is a way to visualise that relation, and the easy way out is never the best way out.
On shaming people for using AI, I offer my two cents: the shame derives, in turn, from the shame that most people have experienced for being beginners and starting poorly. The way writing has been taught, in my experience, focused more or less on how poetic or profound you could sound. It focused less often on how clearly you communicated your ideas (which, IMO, is also where the profundity lies). So people who’ve felt ‘less than’ for writing badly, suddenly being given a tool that takes any half-formed thought and turns it into something that possibly rivals the greats? Small wonder we gravitate towards it the way we do.
I think this is also why sincere detractors of writing with AI, who offer genuine explanations of what we lose as a human when letting AI run the writing game, don’t get through to people as they should. In a productivity-maxxing world, the gains of efficiency far outweigh the gains of taste, and every argument against it feels moral or Luddite.
It’s 100% a slippery slope, which is possibly why people have a black-and-white feeling about it: once you start using it, it takes enormous will and a strong sense of taste and discernment to know where you’ll draw the line.