Why I Don’t Let AI Touch My Writing

I started writing seriously in 1980, when I was eight years old. Personal computers weren’t really a thing back then (although my father, who worked in tech, had an early model), so I wrote everything longhand, from third-grade book reports to the many poems I scribbled outside the classroom. It wasn’t until I went off to college that I finally switched from a typewriter to a word processor for schoolwork (though I stuck to pad and pen for poetry). The advantages of going digital were obvious and irresistible and habit forming, beginning with the power to revise on the fly. If I had to go back to using a mechanical typewriter today, my office would be filled with crumpled sheets of paper, each inscribed with one failed sentence. Hell, the paragraph you’re reading was revised three times before I moved on to the next one!

By the time artificial intelligence came along, I’d been writing for more than four decades. AI makes writing easier in a whole new way, essentially writing for you to whatever degree you choose. Want a lighter touch? Have your agent of choice edit your sentences as you write. Want those blank pages to magically fill up with words while you play Call of Duty in your pajamas? Just enter a semiliterate prompt (“pleez rite a 1200 word esay on chaucers canterberry tails so I dont have to”) and voila, your “work” is done.

As blissfully dependent as I am on Microsoft Word, I have no wish to accept AI’s more active assistance of the writing process, and I never will. Not for moral reasons, mind you. Some writers feel that using AI is cheating, but to me it’s no worse than working with a human collaborator, which is something principled writers have done since the beginning of time. A young Harper Lee leaned heavily on her veteran editor at J. B. Lippincott when she wrote To Kill a Mockingbird, yet no one has ever suggested that Tay Hohoff’s name ought to appear next to Lee’s on the cover of the book. As long as writers disclose their AI use and do their share of the work, I’m cool with it.

Nor do I keep AI at arm’s length in my creative process for aesthetic reasons. I see lots of scared artists comforting themselves with the belief that AI is fundamentally incapable of generating original beauty the way humans can, but while this might be true today, it won’t be true for long. If pure human creativity is to survive, it must do so for reasons other than objective superiority.

Which brings me to the real reasons I’ve banned AI from my writing desk, of which there are three:

For most people, writing is a purely instrumental chore. The average citizen takes little pleasure in typing up a resume cover letter or a dating app profile or anything else. All they care about is the end result. Like an answered prayer, AI allows these logophobes to skip the hair-pulling tedium of writing and go straight to the final product, and from their perspective, anyone who chooses not to take this shortcut has their head up their ass.

But there are those of us who truly love to write, and although we, too, take satisfaction in completing an essay or a novel or whatever, we take far greater satisfaction in the work itself. As Virginia Woolf phrased it in her diaries, “The truth is that writing is the profound pleasure and being read the superficial.” Even if AI can help us write better, or at least faster, we’d rather endure the hair pulling than sacrifice the pleasure of turning empty pages into meaning. From our perspective, creating a written text without actually writing is about as appealing as making a baby without having sex.

If you’re like me and you truly love to write, you want to be good at it, and the only way to be good at writing is to write, the more the better. When you spend ten minutes slaving over a single sentence, straining to get it right, your writer’s mind grows stronger. And when AI writes a sentence for you, your literary faculties weaken. Psychologists call this cognitive offloading, and it literally shrinks the brain, the same way physical offloading (e.g., driving instead of walking) shrinks the muscles. Using AI to turbo charge your writing is like training for the Tour de France on an electric bicycle. When race day comes, you’ll find out the hard way that you’re not very fit.

Even the best human writers are incapable of writing well on the first try. Show me your favorite book and I’ll show you the thirty-fifth revision of a terrible first draft. Leo Tolstoy once told a friend, “I can’t understand how anyone can write without rewriting everything over and over again.”

Writing is mostly rewriting, if you’re doing it right, and rewriting is mostly reading what you’ve written with a ruthless critical eye. George Saunders pictures this critical eye as a meter he wears on his forehead, the needle tipping leftward toward “negative” and rightward toward “positive” as he scans the latest draft of whatever he’s working on. Every writer should read A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, Saunders’s folksy treatise on close reading and the craft of storytelling, where he explains how the forehead meter works:

I try to read what I’ve written the way a first-time reader might (“without hope and without despair”). Where’s the needle? If it drops into the N zone, admit it. And then, instantaneously, a fix might present itself—a cut, a rearrangement, an addition. . . I go through the draft like that, marking it up, then go back and enter that round of changes, print it out, read it again, for as long as I still feel sharp—usually three or four times in a writing day. So: a repetitive, obsessive, iterative application of preference: watch the needle, adjust the prose, watch the needle, adjust the prose (rinse, lather, repeat) through (sometimes) hundreds of drafts, over months or even years.

To be a good writer, it is not enough to have a way with words. You must also be an astute critic, able to sniff out even the subtlest flaws in a piece of writing so that each draft is better than the preceding. Your forehead meter must be well calibrated, so to speak, and the best way to calibrate a forehead meter is to engage in that very “repetitive, obsessive, iterative” process advocated by Tolstoy and Saunders—hour upon hour of eagle-eyed scrutiny and line-by-line fixing.

Writers who rely too much on AI don’t just suck at writing. They also suck at reading, which is worse. Having failed to do the work required to develop good taste in writing, they look at what AI spits out and think it’s James Joyce when in fact it’s James Patterson. If the point of using AI is to fool the world into believing you’re a better James, good luck fooling those of us who commit to “hundreds of drafts” and can see the flaws you’ve missed in the slop you put forward as yours.

It took me two weeks and eighteen total hours to complete this essay. AI could have whipped up something that made the same points in twenty seconds, which would have freed me up to do stuff I don’t enjoy as much, saddled with the knowledge that my brain was shrinking, my way with words fading, and my critical eye losing sharpness. No, thanks.

If you liked this essay, you you might also like my new book, Dying to Run: An Athlete’s Quest for One More Finish.