What we lose when we let AI hold the pen

The hidden cost of outsourcing our thoughts.

Image created by me. I used Canva to combine and edit a photo of my hand holding a pen and generated the robot arm using Midjourney.

I have a new hobby.

It entails scouring my email and social media feeds for any writing content that seems AI-generated. Like a truffle-sniffing hound, I pause on the sentence, study the clichés, and try to determine whether it’s written by a fellow human or Claude.

Sometimes, it’s easy to tell:

Linkedin comments are AI-generated fodder nowadays.

But it’s getting harder to spot AI-generated writing. A seemingly innocent quest has turned into a constant paranoia that what I’m reading has not been written by someone with a pulse, but emerged from a server in the middle of the Iowa plains.

I expect this trend to accelerate. The convenience of offshoring the construction of sentences is thrilling. I’m not always in the mood to write a summary email. Delegating writing tasks to AI so you can spend more time with friends and family seems like a worthwhile trade.

Business emails. Recipes. Legal documents. Bridesmaid Speeches. Obituaries. Everything is up for grabs. AI writing will be omnipresent, and we will not be able to tell the difference.

But the convenience of AI magic comes at a cost.

AI generated writing isn’t simply an evolution in automation. We are not going from the abacus to the calculator. The consequences of AI doing our writing are starkly more dangerous. Outsourcing writing from our lives won’t just make us poorer writers. It will make us worse thinkers.

This sentiment is echoed by Y Combinator Emeritus Dude Paul Graham¹ who wrote on this topic this week:

AI has blown this world open. Almost all pressure to write has dissipated. You can have AI do it for you, both in school and at work. The result will be a world divided into writes and write-nots [...] Yes, it's bad. The reason is something I mentioned earlier: writing is thinking. In fact there's a kind of thinking that can only be done by writing [...] So a world divided into writes and write-nots is more dangerous than it sounds. It will be a world of thinks and think-nots.

I share Graham’s fear. I’m concerned that as with most things we’ve found convenient and wondrous in the 21st century, we dare not look at the second-order effects because the immediate benefit is concrete and meaningful.²

The standard question will become: “why do I need to write this when AI can just write it better?” And as we write less and become shittier writers, we will continue to cede ground to AI writing. The chasm in ability will grow, and soon enough the average writer will write like a child and it will feel like AI writes like Joan Didion. It’s a vicious cycle.

And not to be even more dramatic³, but not only will not writing make us poorer thinkers, but we will also start losing our relationship with language. The words will escape us more often. Our vocabulary will become limited. We’ll speak in memes and clichés. Everything will become ineffable not because of its inherent magnificence, but rather because we’ve become inadequate at attaching language to things.

Once we sever our relationship with language, it becomes harder to explore our reality. After all, in the words of philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein “the limits of my language means the limits of my world.” This would be the final irony of our globalized era—we have the world in our hands, but we’ve lost our ability to define it.

I don’t want us to become Luddites and perform the equivalent of vandalizing a Waymo car to our AI-writing assistants. AI tools are helpful for writing. Do you know how many run-on sentences this piece would have if Claude hadn’t said to me “Camilo, for goodness sake, learn to use periods. I beg you.”?

But we cannot fall into the trap of leaving wordcraft to computers and forget about the power of writing for ourselves. Not everyone needs to be a writer, but everyone should write. Delegate the emails—fine. But get back to writing “thank you” notes. Write a poem. Challenge yourself to a rhyme. Write a book review. Write why you like a song. Journal! Fill your iPhone notes with sentences, your quirks, your peeves, your secrets. Write and ask yourself often, “what am I trying to say?” You may not arrive at an answer, but you’ll never regret asking the question.

The omnipresence of AI writing has reaffirmed my desire to master the craft of writing. The LLM era will increase the noise versus the signal. I’m convinced that those who make a habit of producing great writing will be able to think more clearly and make sense of this twilight age that we live in.

1. An earlier version of this piece referred to Paul Graham as “zaddy” before changing it for “Emeritus Dude.” While reviewing my piece with Claude this is the feedback it gave me: Better transition to the Paul Graham quote (though "Emeritus Dude" is an interesting choice - more casual than "zaddy" but still maintains personality).

2. Groceries that come to you. Love on a screen. Buy anything with a click.

3. Gasps and faints.