AI Will Write for You. But Will You Still Have Ideas?

Over coffee, a writer friend and I laughed at the myth that a good writer’s good writing comes out perfect from the jump. The truth is simpler: good writing is merely the discipline to refine your crappy first draft until it becomes something worth reading.

Oh he/she is such a good writer!

No, my dear. They are a good sculptor.

Ergo,

Good writing is uncomfortable.

New ideas are uncomfortable.

That’s the whole beauty of originality. It spawns from something you hear, read, or see, and it eventually coalesces somewhere on the other side of ponder.

In all our creative endeavors, our job is to turn a mess of mental soup into a hypothesis.

But now AI can read for us, it can write for us, it can “think” for us. What happens when AI takes away our ability to ponder?

Recently Derek Thompson and Cal Newport talked about the implications on Derek's podcast. I found it enlightening. At one part Cal says,

In exercise, in weight lifting, there's this concept called time under tension. You can do a bench press in three seconds, or you can do a bench press in 10 seconds, or you can do the same bench press in 20 seconds, and slow down. It's the same rep, but it's much harder.

It's time under tension. I feel like we're in an age right now where young people are reading less…[and} now with AI, students can write less.

It gives you this sort of cognitive relief. 

I feel like if students aren't reading as much, and they're not writing as much, where's the thinking coming from?...The cognitive equivalent of time under tension.

The way I often think about it is reading builds these smarter circuits and production of content is what helps you actually use the circuits and get good at actually applying them, right? …But to learn how to apply those circuits, to make an original idea, to have original argument, you have to actually practice the production of complex content from scratch, which is like what writing has you do.

So phones distracted us from consumption of things that could make us have better circuits. The fear would be that AI reduces the amount of time you have to spend producing original content ex nihilo (out of nothing).

And so the reduction of production, that is where I think AI is a problem from a cognitive perspective.

The reduction of production isn’t a cute phrase. It’s a warning.

If everyone uses AI to write, everything begins to sound the same. And how you sound is, more or less, how you think. If you start thinking like everyone else, you become indistinguishable from everyone else. 

No originality, no value.

Difference is the point, fam.

So the question isn’t, should you use AI?

Of course you should. It can help you get to the page. It can help you explore. It can be a wonderful partner in early noodling.

But efficiency isn’t insight. 

The work that matters — the uncomfortable, occasionally maddening process of turning mental soup into something original — still has to be done by you. 

In the end, AI is only as interesting as the next idea it helps you wrestle with. And wrestling still requires muscles.