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AI Destroyed Writing
“I wrote a book; I published an article”
These two statement used to be an accomplishment because writing used to be difficult. As the saying goes, “writing is thinking.”
From my experience, writing is really hard thinking. It requires sitting down and mentally crafting something new and unique from the proverbial clay. There are rewrites, the need to step away and come back, finalizing something once an idea begins to flush out- there is a process here.
Before AI, I found writing an article, a good article would take the better part of a morning or afternoon. Even with some of the early writing assistant tools like Grammarly, the heavy lifting was still left to the author.
However, when AI launched via ChatGPT, the world changed basically overnight. The proof? Today, anyone can use one of the AI tools to “write” a book or article in a matter of minutes.
While one can argue that AI tools made writing more democratic, I’d fiercely argue that they have made writing dumber and lazier. Even with my own work, the temptation to use it as an outlining or ideation tool instead of letting it drive the entire creative process is often too easy to ignore. Shortcuts scream to be taken.
