I’ve recently come into contact with AI writing in the workplace, and I had trouble pinning down exactly why I take issue with it. I spent all weekend writing my thoughts with the intent of putting it on the blog.

The basic idea is that the act of writing is much more than the secular encoding of thoughts into words. It’s a tool for organizing thoughts and scrutinizing them. Letting AI write for you is robbing yourself of the task of learning, of knowing your own thoughts.

Our thoughts come to us in fragments, out of order, and cognitively distorted. They’re tricky, too. Sometimes—more often than we think—they can feel so resonant that we mistake them for truth. And somehow everyone reliably forgets that they are not an exception to all of this.

Writing applies a rigor to thinking that dispels these issues. Rephrasing, reordering, adding, cutting, expanding, contracting, and editing language is how we navigate vast conceptual terrain. That’s what makes writing so valuable. Writing benefits the writer and the reader. An AI fundamentally cannot replace the process of the writer relating to the ideas and to the words. Writing is the forging of insight.

Ironically, I couldn’t seem to finish the essay. I wrote it and rewrote it several times, but there was something missing. I had good ingredients, but no wider structure emerged for me. And because my motto is “if you can’t write it, you didn’t really think it,” I backed off.

Then a short blog post ran by my feed and it did a decent job of articulating my thoughts on the matter. It linked back to Jordan Peterson’s Guide to Writing, a very valuable document that contains the philosophy that I am likely referencing.

Of course! The whole world is processing our response to AI, and I’m certainly not the only one with these thoughts. It’s nice to be reminded that there’s an ongoing cultural conversation that isn’t dominated by the companies selling the tech. I’m realizing I might have some catching up to do.

Theoretically, an AI can sit at the forefront of cultural conversation, making it the oracle that the public at large wants to treat it as. Progress, though, is earned slowly through human introspection, and this bottleneck is unavoidable. And I don’t mean “progress” as in techno-optimist futuristic progress; I simply mean the evolution of our social contract over time.

Let technology handle the execution of increasingly complex tasks, but only humans can decide what is good for themselves. And everyone should participate in that decision.

No one can be expected to be insightful about everything, but everyone should try to produce insight about something. Learn your ass off and do your best to save others the trouble of doing the same.