Don't Skip the Good Part

I read something the other day that struck me immediately as exactly right, even though I hadn’t thought of it that way before.

AI is being offered as a service to save the wrong kind of labor.

Not entirely, of course. There are AI tools being developed that can be genuinely helpful as labor-saving devices, from spell-checkers and search engines to brainstorming and research assistants. AI is being used in medical and scientific research to dramatically speed up certain types of analysis—work that would otherwise take more time than anyone has available.

But AI is also being marketed as a tool for writing outlines and early drafts, supposedly saving humans from these tasks so we can move on to the “important” parts of writing stories, reports, essays, and papers. And that’s wrong.

Because the purpose of writing an outline isn’t just to have an outline—it’s to think through what you want to write. Writing is a form of thinking, a way to process ideas more fully, whether you’re working through a personal experience in a journal or analyzing Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar for an English class. You don’t write an outline just to have one; you write an outline to write an outline. And if outlining doesn’t work that way for you, then you don’t need it (unless, of course, you’re in school and required to do it).

A lot of people worry that AI will take over—that it will rebel against us or replace us. That, as I’ve explained before, is highly unlikely. Others argue that using AI for writing is cheating—which may be true if you’re in an English class, but otherwise, what does it even mean to “cheat” at writing?

Still, there are things to be cautious about with this new technology—real problems these programs could create if we’re not careful. One of the biggest dangers is that we might accidentally automate something we actually need to do ourselves.

Before you hand off a task to a machine, make sure you understand its real purpose. It might turn out that doing it yourself is the whole point.