No to AI as a Writer

Summary

• An email is not a novel, and AI may suit some kinds of writing better than others.
• I suspect people turn to AI because they do not want to do the work.
• Others sneered that she didn’t understand how AI works, or that she objected only when AI came for creative work, not cleaners’ jobs.

AI Generated Summary

I have always been a writer, so you would expect me to welcome AI with open arms. It can draft blog posts and stories, write my emails, build marketing copy, even come up with a snappy tagline. But if I let it, I would be cutting out the most important part of writing, the act of doing it. Much of writing happens when you are not writing at all. It is the time your brain spends turning ideas over in the background, pulling connections from experiences that seem unrelated. Finding patterns is what our brains do best, and it works best when left alone. If you have ever had an “aha” moment while washing dishes or reaching for a book, you know what I mean. AI, by contrast, learns from finished work, static words that came out of someone else’s messy creative process. But writing, even a simple email, is iteration. You write, delete, rewrite, choose, reject, start, and stop. It is like shaping clay, small touches, tearing it down when it is not right, starting again. That constant reworking is what makes good writing good. AI cannot pick it up from published text, because nobody publishes their hundred discarded drafts. It only revises when I tell it to, which means writing a better prompt, then revising that prompt. And what happens when I ask AI to write the prompt for me? Letting AI gather your words is like taking the pencil out of an artist’s hand. Give that artist a screen and VR gloves and the picture might even turn out well, but it will not feel like pencil on paper. Something gets lost, some stubbornly human spark that goes beyond the mechanics of drawing. You have heard the phrase “a turn of phrase.” It is when a writer lands on a sentence that grabs the reader, moves them, maybe even prompts a revelation. AI rarely gives you that, because AI is built for utility. It treats writing as a delivery truck and sands off the complexity that makes prose worth reading. Reading is as visual as it is intellectual, sentence length, word choice, punctuation, and paragraph size all matter. Writing should suit its audience, but that does not mean readers should not be challenged. If we assume everyone reads at a fourth-grade level and write only for that, how will we ever learn whether they wanted more.  Do not get me wrong, I am not calling for a ban. A system that can chew through huge, scattered sources of data faster than I can makes a lot of sense. I shall ask AI to summarize a long report or spot patterns, and I am glad for the head start. That might sound hypocritical: handing over the analytical part of my brain but guarding the creative part. But when AI analyzes something, I am still in the loop. I check its conclusions, and if I disagree, I dig into the data myself. When I hand over the writing, I lose everything that happens in my head while I do it. A rough AI start that I then rewrite might be a fair use, but only as a head start. Writing is complicated. An email is not a novel, and AI may suit some kinds of writing better than others. But at bottom, writing is the expression of human thought, and no system can do that for you. I suspect people turn to AI because they do not want to do the work. Putting thoughts into words precise enough for a reader to understand is hard, and if something else can carry that load, they can spend their energy elsewhere.