Opinion: AI-assisted Writing Is Close to Becoming as Standard as Spell Check. Here’s the Catch

While AI assistants might be able to help us with our own thinking, it's likely that in many cases they'll end up replacing that thinking. In a recent article in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Columbia undergraduate Owen Kichizo Terry described using ChatGPT not to edit his own ideas but to generate the substantive components of his college papers, leaving him only to stitch those ideas together. Using AI to generate ideas, create an outline and provide specific instructions for writing each paragraph, Terry wasn't using an AI assistant; he had become the assistant — and so will we.

Grammarly promises that its "personalized generative AI co-creator" will help you "compose and ideate" so "you never have to experience [writing] alone."

Once we let the chatbot fill the blank page, the bot's text will shape our understanding of the topic — with whatever limitations, biases and errors go with it. To effectively assess AI-generated drafts, we'll need to be able to ask difficult questions, analyze evidence, consider counterarguments — in other words, to do the same important work we do when we write ourselves. But if we no longer value doing our own writing — if every time we open a Google or Word document, we're prompted to save time by turning to the bot — we may get to the point when we don't know how to think for ourselves anymore. Even if we don't lose our jobs to AI, we'll lose what matters about them.

Writing is hard because the process of getting something onto the page helps us figure out what we think — about a topic, a problem or an idea. If we turn to AI to do the writing, we're not going to be doing the thinking either.

I got advance access to Google Docs' new "Help me write" feature, which is expected to be rolled out to all users soon. Once you have this feature, it becomes the default in Google's word processor: The magic wand appears every time you open a document, ready to generate and revise text for you. If you want to write yourself, you have to close the feature.