AI is turning us into editors of ourselves. We approve what we no longer know how to create
Some time ago Spark, my email clientintegrated an AI response generator that learns from your style. It works surprisingly well. Since then I follow a simple rule: if the email comes from a human, I respond by typing. If it comes from a bot or mass mailing, I let the AI answer for me. The fact is that it is increasingly difficult to distinguish which is which. And that’s where the real problem begins. Because it’s not about efficiency. It is about we have accepted, without realizing it, that communication can be symmetrical in its mediocrity. You write to me with AI, I respond to you with AI. We all save time. Nobody says anything quite real. I know too many people who have crossed the line: using AI not just for generic emails, but for everything: Tweets that sound like a corporate manual. LinkedIn posts with that unctuous and necessarily inspirational prose that smells of prompt wander from three paragraphs away. Proposals to clients. Reports to the boss. Slack messages that you used to write in seconds and now go through ChatGPT. They have become editors of their own communication. Creative directors of words that they no longer search for. And in a way it works, you have to admit. The report arrives on time. The proposal sounds professional. The tweet, for reasons unknown to me, achieves engagement. If the result is what counts, and it saves you time, what’s the problem? The problem is subtle. So subtle that almost no one notices it. Writing was never just about producing readable text. It was the friction of searching for the exact word, and in that search better understanding what you wanted to say. Writing was thought becoming visible, even to oneself. The effort to articulate was the effort to think clearly. I remember some articles in which I noticed that effort until I reached the result I wanted. An example is this 2019long before ChatGPT. That process matters. Now we delegate that friction. We give the AI a vague idea and it articulates it for us. We just need to recognize if it sounds good, not generate it from scratch. We have gone from being authors to being approvers. Something atrophies when you stop looking for your own words. It’s not just personality or style. It is the ability to think accurately, because thinking well and writing well were always the same thing. When you externalize articulation, you externalize thinking. The worst thing is that it is invisible. There is no dramatic moment in which you stop knowing how to think. You just start to need a little more help each time. A little push to find the words. Then a full draft that you just “revise.” Then you don’t even check carefully because “AI makes it cool.” The argument is always the same: “but the result is good.” And yes, it may be. The report is understood. The proposal convinces. The tweet works. But There is a difference between a text that works and a text that you really thought. The first can get you a client. The second can make you understand something you didn’t know you thought. This is how an entire generation can lose the ability to articulate complex ideas without realizing it. Because each individual step seems reasonable. Every shortcut seems harmless. And the results, indeed, are acceptable. But “acceptable” has become the new standard. And in the process we have forgotten that writing was not just a means to communicate ideas that were already clear to us. It was the very mechanism to keep things clear.. AI is not making us worse writers. It is turning us into non-writers. And without writing, without that struggle to find the right words, pWe also lose the ability to have ideas worth writing down.. We have normalized an existence where we monitor our own communication instead of generating it. Where we approve instead of create. Where language is something that we recognize when we see it, but that we will no longer know how to produce from silence. And we call it productivity. In Xataka | I increasingly like technology that doesn’t want anything from me: the one that has a purpose and leaves you alone Featured image | Xataka
