You may have seen the recent MIT paper presenting data suggesting that using ChatGPT for your writing causes your cognitive abilities to atrophy from lack of use. So, I thought it was worth thinking a bit about when one might choose to take the trade-off of ease and speed as opposed to writing the painful old-fashioned way.
There are types of writing where the majority of value is in the process of creation. Think about notetaking. You may never go back and read your notes, but the simple act of writing them out will help cement the ideas in your mind. An AI notetaker will likely take better notes than you will. If you use that as an excuse to skip writing out your own notes, you are likely slipping into lossy territory. Writers in the study who used ChatGPT overwhelmingly couldn’t remember what they had written. So, if it is important to remember, you need to write it yourself. An AI notetaker still adds value and can supplement your own notes. It can even check the box for a meeting that you don’t care to remember — not that that ever happens.
The writing submitted with the aid of ChatGPT was described as “soulless” and “typical”. You could argue that this isn’t always the case or that it will improve, but let’s take the subjective feedback as fact. There are many use cases where this style of writing is just fine. I think of this broadly as form-filling writing. This is writing where I don’t care to remember what’s there, I just need something reasonable. In this case, the tradeoff of gaining increased speed and not using some cognitive horsepower is a plus. I tend to write with some zest and pizzazz. That may not always be what’s called for. I have found LLMs useful to tone things down a bit in certain situations.
You need to be able to write, even if you are not a “writer”. Writing is thinking and communicating. Most of us need to do that for our jobs, and all of us need that for our humanity. So, be intentional, as always, my friends.