AI Can Reproduce Writing, But Not the Process of Writing
The other day, Meghan O’Rourke, the executive editor of The Yale Review, wrote a guest essay for The New York Times entitled: ‘The Seductions of A.I. for the Writer’s Mind’.1 A friend sent it to me knowing I may have strong opinions on it given my love of writing and my many thoughts on AI. And I do.
While I appreciate that the post is actually fairly nuanced on the topic, with the author bringing up both upsides and downsides of weaving the technology into her own work and workflow (and those of her students), I also feel like she largely overlooks something which, to me at least, is perhaps the key way to frame this whole debate. Everyone is so worried about how AI is going to alter the written word — well, the typed word, I suppose — across basically every dimension. That is to say, the output. But really, the key thing to focus on here may be the input. And by that I don’t mean the words that are sucked into the large language models in order to train them. But I mean the input that goes into your head. Into your brain.
Said another way: to me, the most important element of writing isn’t what you put on the page, it’s how the process of putting something on the page alters your thoughts...