AI Can’t Gaslight Me if I Write by Hand
This is an excellent essay by Deb Werrlein.
There are so many excellent thoughts spread throughout about writing not just as a result but as a process and how the process is what makes it writing as opposed to reading or editing.
It talks about how writing is a process of discovery because you never know where your thoughts will take you or where the story will lead.
This is an essay about the work and the joy that goes into actually writing.
The physical act of writing serves as the distraction that lets the ideas flow. But also, and perhaps more importantly, writing forces the writer to think very slowly, only allowing the brain to move through an idea at the speed at which each individual word can be written. Perhaps that elongation of thinking gives the brain the time it needs to have new realizations. So much discovery happens as a piece of writing evolves that, like many writers, I often set out to write with the purpose of finding answers and prompting evolutions. In this way, writing itself functions as a generative act, a process of discovery and learning that far exceeds the simple recording and communicating of already formed ideas.
Composing on the computer happens delightfully fast, but I wonder: if writing is a process of discovery and learning, then what discoveries did I lose by speeding up the process? What connections haven’t I made? Is there a level of richness or complexity I haven’t achieved because I’ve spent less time engaged in that magic writerly state of mind and therefore, less time exposed to the possibility of revelation? I can’t escape the thought that if slowness is key to writing, and writing is a way of thinking, perhaps each tech-driven acceleration of the process has chipped away at my depth of thought.
Writing is hard, so I see why some might be tempted to let a machine do the initial composing. The blank page represents the most difficult phase of writing because this is when the writer must engage with their topic most fully. In the absence of time or energy, AI might sound like a great solution—just as past innovations felt like godsends. But AI brings changes far more dramatic than those of the typewriter. If I let an LLM compose my first draft, only to edit and shape it and supposedly make it my own afterward—as I’ve heard some writers suggest—then I would have skipped over that initial composition process, that period of intense intellectual engagement through which we enrich our ideas. I would sacrifice the element of discovery, learning, and creation in favor of the LLM’s regurgitation. If the future offers a world filled with AI-produced prose, who knows how much we will collectively lose to writing created without all those unique incidents of epiphany and realization.
And the final paragraph has a wonderful revelation.
And I wonder if perhaps we’ve gotten confused, thinking we should always use the extra time technology affords to do more things faster rather than using it to do fewer things slower.
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