I wrote this without an AI. This isn’t because I oppose the technology: I design and build them for a living. Neither it’s a gesture of pride on effort for its own sake (which I don’t feel) or some intrinsic preference for human over computer labor (if anything it’s the other way around).
What “written without an AI” means is that I spent time writing something “by hand” because I wanted to say something hopefully new or in a new way; google-and-rephrase isn’t very good at either. It’s not self-restraint but rather a deliberate choice in cognitive architecture: AI text generation is fantastic at some things and arguably worse than nothing at others, and to try to put new thoughts in new ways it’s among the worst possible approaches.
What I write, of course, could be much worse — that’s not the promise but the shared risk. The promise is that I’m trying to write something different from what an AI would have been trained on, which is why I can’t use it.
My dual choice is to try to use AI to think about things; the opposite move for the same goal. If I’m attempting to understand something a bit better than what could be quickly gleaned and summarized — to understand it beyond the ability to just write and say something about it — AIs, specially if built or configured for a given domain, are hugely powerful at helping see things in new ways. A text generation AI has learned about language as used, so it’s better at saying what’s usually said. AIs built to think about other domains don’t generate texts but can push forward understanding in entirely new ways.
These aren’t quick or easy ways to write or think so they aren’t always optimal. The work I do doesn’t depend much on volume, so every bit of extra understanding and precision I can gain is worth the extra time spent thinking and writing. In other situations, roles, industries, or times, the opposite would be true. One day text generation might become precise and controllable enough that I’ll trust it to say what I mean even if I’m attempting to say not something on the Internet but something inside my head. That day I’ll stop writing this sort of thing. Very happily so.
But my best thinking will never be without AIs. That ship has long sailed for all of us.