Why We Write in the AI Era | Original
The most important reason we still need to write in the AI era is that it helps us think better. It is easy to use AI to help expand ideas or thoughts, but AI can’t help you think.
I am not against using AI to fix grammar. However, using prompts to make text more coherent might indicate that we don’t think clearly.
Recently, I have been thinking about AI-first architecture in modern development. I shared some of these thoughts with my engineer friend and used them to expand an essay.
Surely, AI helps complete my thoughts. It is good to read AI answers or evaluations of my points. But after one month, I think I will forget them.
Paul Graham wrote The Age of the Essay. He discusses similar ideas.
Also, if you learn with AI and just read AI answers, you may encounter problems when taking exams. You might find that you are still unable to work out many quiz questions.
Why? Because if you don’t think them through by yourself, you can’t fully understand the material. Yin Wang, in his essay Learning Wisdom, mentioned this as well.
It seems the quiz questions in exams are similar to what you read during your studies. Actually, you didn’t comprehend much of that. So, when you need to think out answers for yourself in an exam that forbids using the Internet, you are unable to do so.
But if AI can’t help us write, then we will lose much of its benefits. What we need to use carefully with AI is to think through important decisions for ourselves.
AI can tell us how to act or react in current situations. But AI couldn’t know our hearts. What we do and how we react largely depend on who we are, our mental state, and our surroundings.
AI can’t know much of that context, so it can’t help us decide how to act. It may point out solutions, like telling us to join a growing startup or prepare for exams. But it can’t help us with the actual steps.
Possibly, AI use is still limited. We need to use mobile phones or laptops to chat with AI chatbots. Now, we have AI glasses like Meta Quest, but they are still expensive and not available globally.
But what if we can use AI anytime, anywhere? Is it good to use AI and follow its suggestions to act? It is hard. It is hard to follow exact steps to achieve something we think we want.
Because it is possible that the target is wrong. The targets or goals we tell AI to help us achieve may be wrong, unrealistic, or pursuing the validation of others. So, not to mention the exact steps.
We know what to do as we grow up. That’s shaped by a lifetime of experience. It is about our journey and how we interact with our surroundings. In our minds, there are probably millions of thoughts. With that many thoughts, we decide what to do every day, every week, every year.
For questions like what to do, how to live a good life, and how to make important decisions, AI can’t help us. We are better off writing down our thoughts and reflecting on them a lot.
We can think if we don’t write down our thoughts. So why do we write them down? Because, as Paul Graham says, when you form a sentence, you will have new thoughts. When we construct our thoughts, we are actually thinking, and it triggers new thoughts. This kind of thinking is not easy to achieve by pure thought alone.
It is like doing math. When you write steps down on paper, you will probably have a better chance of finding answers. It is hard to do it by pure thinking.