Why Using AI to Write for You Is a Bad Idea

Summary

This opinion essay argues that using an AI language model to compose writing removes an important part of the thinking process. The author accepts that LLMs can be valuable for translation, accessibility, editing, and other tasks, and constructs a hypothetical model free of ethical, environmental, economic, and reliability concerns. Even such an ideal system, the author argues, would still be poorly used as a substitute for writing because composing forces people to organize ideas, test arguments, discover connections, and learn. The author applies the same reasoning to workplace prose: an LLM may be useful for cleaning up a human draft, but having it generate text for another person to read is described as disrespectful “work slop.” Programming receives a more qualified treatment. LLMs are considered effective at repetitive code that implements familiar business patterns, but writing code manually can be more valuable when developers are learning an unfamiliar domain or discovering information that changes their approach. The conclusion is that the difficulty of writing is not merely an obstacle to efficiency; it is part of the intellectual purpose of the activity.