Comic-style illustration of writer sitting next to robot who is writing for him"

I’m not sure how to say this without sounding like your high school English teacher, but when you let AI do the writing, you’re only cheating yourself.

Yes, I know, writing is so much easier now that you don’t actually have to write. (Coming up with a “prompt” for an AI model isn’t writing.)

But we’re making a Faustian bargain with the AI gods: in exchange for painlessly perfect prose, we’re sacrificing rare, elusive moments of clarity and creativity.

Real writing — the kind where you spend long periods staring uncomfortably at a blank page — is undeniably hard. It’s clear thinking, distilled and explained in a way that other people can understand. That’s a two-part activity: considering a topic deeply enough so you understand it and then figuring out how to communicate that knowledge.

There’s a big obstacle here: focused, analytical thinking is unpleasant to do. Almost anything else that might occupy your attention is more appealing. So it takes a fair amount of self-discipline to force yourself to do it.

Even if you have some small success with thinking and eke out a few insightful nuggets, you still need to find a way to explain what you’ve learned to someone else. And that can be a gaping chasm to cross. How do you assemble sentences and paragraphs that inform, persuade, and maybe even entertain your readers? It’s not easy.

In 2004, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos banned PowerPoint presentations from meetings with his senior team.

In their place, he later explained: “All of our meetings are structured around a six-page narrative memo. When you have to write your ideas out in complete sentences and complete paragraphs, it forces a deeper clarity of thinking.”

It also sparks creativity. Because in doing the writing — and only by doing the writing — unexpected ideas arise. When you shine a light on topics that you had only scarcely considered before, new possibilities gradually become apparent.

The painter Chuck Close said: “Work kicks open doors. In the process of doing something, other things occur to you, and you end up where you didn’t plan to be.”

That’s true for writing, too. But you’ve got to put in the effort to get there.

Like painting, writing is a craft: you hone your skills over time with practice and persistence.

Even before AI, the truth is that few people mastered this craft, whether for want of ability or effort. But the relatively small number of people who do write well have had an outsize impact on society.

I worry that AI will make that small number even smaller, and deprive us of writing — and thinking — that can change the world.

Maybe the answer is some form of collaborative AI, which doesn’t do all of the work for you, but instead helps you discover what you have to say.

But I think it would be a mistake to entirely tame the ferocity of the blank page. Staring into the void is a scary, but necessary, first step if you want to write anything worth reading.■