The Problem With AI-Assisted Writing
Writing is supposed to be difficult. The most important and challenging part of writing is grappling with an idea, trying to get at the core of what it is you’re trying to express. The words are the easy part. Once an idea has been fully thought through, once it’s been fully grasped, the words almost write themselves. AI-assisted writing, the kind that offers suggestions on what to write about or even does some of the composition for you, undermines this process. By removing the obstacles that make it difficult to proceed, it removes the very thing that forces the writer to stop and think.
America’s “biographer-in-chief,” Robert Caro, goes so far as to avoid computers, not because of AI, but because computers remove the friction that makes time for thought. He writes in longhand, before typing up his drafts on a typewriter. When he was young, his professor at Princeton told him that while his writing was good, he wasn’t going to achieve his potential unless he stopped “thinking with [his] fingers.” As Caro explains, the problem was that writing was just too easy for him:
No real thought, just writing—because writing was so easy. Certainly never thinking anything all the way through. And writing for a daily newspaper had been so easy, too. When I decided to write a book, and, beginning to realize the complexity of the subject, realized that a lot of thinking would be required—thinking things all the way through, in fact, or as much through as I was capable of—I determined to do something to slow myself down, to not write until I had thought things through. That is why I resolved to write my first drafts in longhand, slowest of the various means of committing thoughts to paper, before I started doing later drafts on the typewriter; that is why, even now that typewriters have been replaced by computers, I still stick to my Smith-Corona Electra 210.1
Something similar applies to writing that aims to communicate a feeling. Unlike the writing that grapples with an idea, here you are grappling with an emotion, trying to find the words to transmit a spiritual state. Where the former is difficult when you don’t fully understand an idea, the latter is difficult when the emotion you’re trying to express isn’t sincere. This is where AI assistance is even more insidious, because it removes even the discomfort of having to lie. When, for example, some company’s PR manager writes a letter of apology to their customers for a mistake the company made, they no longer have to pretend to care. The large language model will do it for them.
The difficulty of writing is a bit like the cryptographic proof of work. The effort expended on the work demonstrates that some amount of intellectual or emotional labor was invested in the words. AI assistance diminishes that proof, if not altogether erasing it. This is why people have such an aversion to words they suspect were written with the help of AI. It’s a sign that the writer either doesn’t care enough about what they’re publishing to invest the time and effort to think it through or, even worse, that they are insincere.