This from Rebecca Solnit is my biggest fear about AI. Writing teaches me about myself, and I can't imagine handing that over to a machine whose only incentive is monetizing every aspect of my life. But many people will make that bargain, sacrificing their own self-awareness in the process.

Definitely second this. Just happened to me tonight, where writing unleashed a whole new thought. @janerosenzweig.bsky.social and I have been wondering why this is not given more attention in the rush to adopt AI.

AI annoys me for many reasons. One of these being that, maybe one day it will be very technically fluent when it comes to writing, but it will miss one important thing. If I am reading your story and identify with you, then I know that I am not alone in my experience. A machine can’t do that.

Absolutely. I often tell students, we don’t simply think then write, we think through writing. The hard graft is revision.

A lot of people have told me that they use ChatGPT to do a first draft and it helps overcome writer's block, and I guess I'm happy for them but I do NOT get it.

As Karl Weick explained, “how do I know what I think, until I see what I say?” And in writing, this is where we’re finally forced to make hard decisions about structure and relationships between ideas. We may lose that when AI fills in those thoughts for us.

This holds true for all deep exploration, and it's going to do us no favors in any field. "It's easier to get chatgpt to explain it" And you just robbed your coworker of the opportunity to deepen their understanding. 🤷🏼‍♀️

Yes. And while I’m glad that more famous writers are voicing this publicly, there are also writing scholars who study how writing works and why and who can speak to this, but writing scholars are a) never asked, & b) too busy wondering if we’ll have jobs in the new dystopia to do interviews…

Also sacrificed will be that purely wonderful like-no-other experience of flow.

I think this has been nagging at me as an unformed thought I hadn't been able to finish

Joan Didion said it well: “I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.”