Writing, Originality and AI
How AI will affect writing and thinking
It’s easy to write bullet points about an idea, but it takes a lot of work to craft those bullet points into effective paragraphs. In the past I argued that people should sometimes just use outlines or other formats rather than writing a proper essay. However converting bullet points into paragraphs involves two aspects:
Crafting the ideas into aesthetically pleasing sentences and paragraphs that connect to each other
Actually refining the ideas so that they spell out the point more fully rather than just hinting to the idea
While there might be other ways to spell out ideas fully, paragraphs are a common way to do so, so writing essays and blog posts is still relevant.
How could tools like ChatGPT help with writing? If the idea is original, ChatGPT might not be as useful for fleshing out the idea since they won’t know the nuances you’re trying to communicate. It can still provide feedback on your writing and point to things that could be improved but it won’t be able to convert your bullet points into a great essay. Even if it can help with the “aesthetic” part of writing, the actual writing may be too intertwined with the “refining of ideas” for it to generate an essay.
However a lot of writing isn’t completely original. In these cases tools like ChatGPT could likely generate a decent essay from bullet points, especially as these AI tools improve. It may be difficult to guide the AI to say exactly what you want since at that point you’d just be writing the essay yourself, but it can still serve the role of a speech writer formulating your overall message.
If the idea already exists, does it really need to be written again? In the past, people might write without worrying about whether someone else has posted a similar idea online, but this will be harder to ignore going forward. Right now it’s still a bit hard to quickly match up specific ideas with existing content, but pretty soon the AI tools will be able to find anything similar written about any topic.
How will writing online change then? Perhaps some of it will become more like academic publishing where one is only supposed to publish new ideas? It certainly seem like truly original ideas will be valued more, but those are rare. People often read reformulations of the same content (e.g. “10 Dieting Tips”) but it will become even more obvious how trite this kind of content is. If the content isn’t better than what ChatGPT can output, people may rather turn to the AI to generate content tailored to their specific queries.
A lot of the online discussion may be interesting for the participants even if it’s not truly original, just like discussions IRL (in real life). It will initially feel weird how easy it is to find similar points made elsewhere but this is something people are able to ignore, just like today people don’t always exhaustively research a topic before discussing it. The AI tools being so readily available may make it easier for people to only half-think whenever writing online. This habit might make it harder for people to learn how to think on their own which is still necessary for completely new ideas. But AI may soon start producing original ideas as well. And then the question will just be whether we value thought for its own sake.