Writing is challenging, and while making that effort is hard, it's also valuable.

AI has its appropriate uses, but we should focus on creating our own work first.

One good use of AI may be as a sparring partner to help vet ideas.

I began writing a paper the other day; laid out my plan for the "story" and set about pulling the introduction together. I hit roadblocks here and there, struggled to find the right expression for the ideas floating around in my head, paused, stood up and paced, started up again, and eventually packed it up to be dealt with in my next writing session.

And at some point, it occurred to me: I like this. I find this fun. There is joy in the challenging process of writing.

Now I am not anti-AI. I have used it for a variety of purposes. (I will say I am against the theft of work to build AI models, whether that be written work or visual art, and I will be a beneficiary of the successful lawsuit against Anthropic after they stole my book co-authored with John Eastwood, Out of My Skull.)

But I do think we lose something if we give up tasks to large language models (LLMs) that we could do ourselves.

Downsides of Using AI

First, we become more boring. I have written about this elsewhere. LLMs are data-hungry, predictive algorithms. It's that predictive nature that makes them implant the most probable word in any given sentence. As Mark Bieleke and Wanja Wolff recently highlighted, this will essentially be regression to the mean; we will all begin to sound alike. Imagine if literature did this? All novels reading like they were written by Dan Brown? (You could choose an author you liked more; and to be clear, I have never read a Dan Brown........

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