Don't Use AI for Writing

Writing is a useful skill to develop. It can help you discover what you think, develop judgment, and become a critical thinker. Writing can also be pleasurable in itself. You can feel the ownership of the results of your writing.

AI is there as a sharp contrast to us as beginners of writing. The ease with which AI generates plausible and polished text is attractive. The pressure to take the shortcut and have AI suggest ideas, rewrite your text, or generate it whole, can be hard to resist and it is the biggest barrier for us to keep developing our writing skills.

Still, we should resist the temptation.

My first reason is that it will replace any ideas I have about how to form the sentences. Any sentence it writes is more polished and is as plausible as anything that I could ever write. And while my sentences are clunky, they are my sentences. It gives me joy, that my writing could help or convince someone. And even if it does not, it has helped me to develop and organize my ideas.

The second reason is that it can destroy my motivation in seconds. The motivation to write is the most precious resource we have in this time of AI. Instead of generating the text and be done with it, we should struggle with the ideas, the sentences, and whole act of writing. When I keep AI away, I can keep struggling longer.

Now let’s look at three ways that I use to keep myself from using AI and write for myself. The most important idea is to keep the AI from writing plausible looking text, which is polished enough to keep you from rewriting it. When we have our own unpolished words in a text editor is one hundred times better than having a very polished AI-generated text full of tropes that reads well, but misses the point.

First keep in mind the goal of why you are writing. If your only goal is to have some output and if you don’t care about anything else, then use AI. But when your goal is to become a better writer, to improve yourself, then no amount of AI writing will help you do that. The AI written text will not take hold of you in the same way as text that you have written yourself. The text that you write, makes you a better person. You will have struggled with the ideas.

Second, for me, the best way to have my own ideas is to write them first on index cards as part of my Zettelkasten. This way I have a bigger barrier that prevents me from putting the text in the AI chatbot. This does not mean that I have to write a full article on cards. I just write the basic ideas and then expand them when I write the whole text.

The last way to resist, is to remember what it is like to read AI-written text from other people. To read AI text from someone seems like you are not important to them. That they won’t take the time to write their own words in a way that shows what they care about. Remember that what you would not read, someone else probably also wouldn’t read.