Writing

This intriguing thought by thekla on writing and using AI to write.

but on a deeper level, writing is more than just the process by which you obtain a piece of text, right? it’s also about finding out what you wanted to say in the first place, and how you wanted to say it. this post existed in my head first as a thought, then it started to gel into words, and then i tried pulling those words out to arrange them in a way that (hopefully) gets my point across. there is nothing extra there, no filler. i alone can get the thought out and writing is how i do that.

and sure, there is a lot of text that is not written with this kind of goal. but then, perhaps, we should ask why it has to be written in the first place; and if the cost of that might be higher than just the co2 that is attributable to its creation. in a similar vein, neither should we forget to ask whether those texts that are now written by ai would indeed otherwise have been written by humans, or if there isn’t an awful lot of text produced now that simply no one would have spent their time writing before.