wasn't AI suppose to make my writing better?

On AI-assisted writing and the existential tension of creativity

Lately I have been feeling a void with my writing. As usual, I like to inspect where this problem is emerging from so that I can go to the bottom of it and "fix" it.

When I was introduced to ChatGPT around April 2024, I was thrilled that this thing autocompletes my thoughts. It saved me the mental bandwidth to write ten pages of brain dump, edit it to two and publish the final one-pager with key ideas, fine-tuned and optimized for human engagement and readability.

Back in the day, we did not worry much about pleasing algorithms and declining attention spans. My partner recalls my initial resistance to using ChatGPT and was surprisingly shocked when he saw me getting into the rabbit hole of AI research and becoming a convert!

I tried to not think much about it, but honestly I think this wasn't the usual awe and delusional magic of AI we all seem to like and feel. There is something likeable about this new species we are creating, its potential to contribute to our life in a meaningful way and to help everyone explore their unseen creative side, which most people do not tap into due to inhibitions and social judgments. AI giving encouraging feedback felt like being seen and heard by someone "who gets you."

Or so I felt. Until this weekend when I was reflecting on my black book notes.

A Step Back

I keep a handy notebook where I jot down all my thoughts and ideas that come to me while cooking, reading, yoga, meditation, and later at my desk, I flip through them to see if there is an idea worth writing about or exploring from a research point of view.

When I was flipping through my recent notes, I noticed something was missing. Maybe I was directly putting my ideas in the chatbox of GPT, or maybe I was not thinking as much about new ideas at all.

My GPT would generate ten ideas to write about given the prompt to do so. I don't know what this cognitive change was (it is so slow that it is hard to notice until I deeply introspected about it).

This discovery led me to an uncomfortable realization about what was happening to my thinking process.

The Uncomfortable Truth

The mass content with the same formatting style to suit the LinkedIn algorithm filling my feed made me feel like a content factory. We have shifted our thinking to Claude and ChatGPT when these tools are actually being fine-tuned in the upcoming models for "doing" and not "thinking." Reasoning in these models is technically a myth. They are giant pattern matching systems and I know this, proven by the same format, same sounding LinkedIn posts (I even ran some experiments to please the algorithm and instantly went viral with 50K impressions, proving my point).

This is highly uncomfortable for someone like me. What is unique to us as humans?

First, I moved my writing to AI and now I already feel like I am moving my thinking there too. My black notebook does not have as many short random ideas captured as it used to.

Optimization leads to quantity; more work gains visibility, more eyeballs, more outreach, but the trade-off is human ability to "connect the dots" and spark their own "eureka" moment.

This "aha" moment gives the dopamine hit upon discovering new ideas through synthesis of reading a fictional novel and solving a chemistry problem and waking up to find something unique that helps you see the world in a totally different way.

A realization dawns on me that I am as good with my writing as my AI model's ability to think of the next best word to match the idea it is putting together, making my writing feel like a lot of luck and less of a tool for self-discovery and "knowing," which was the reason and the whole point of writing.

But there's something deeper at play here. It's not just about the ideas themselves, but how my brain processes and stores experiences.

Memory and the Human Element

Besides the lack of new ideas and discovery of new connections between two random thoughts, my third problem is with memory and recollection.

Humans do not store all their memories as a filing system; they reconstruct it as and when the need arises to internalize a process or problem statement. This is why Bob Dylan said we make up our past and every time we reconstruct a memory, we add new insights or narrative to it.

The greatest tragedy is our belief that we cannot change our past. We can, and our brain is reorganizing those experiences all the time (in my view).

When I recollected the Myanmar story of loss and love, I took a minute to send my brain to those moments where I was at the pagoda having a conversation on loss and family with the lady. The ability to jump back to Myanmar in a minute and come back within a few seconds back to my desk is a human phenomenon. AI does not have continual learning (as of now), which means it cannot go back to its entire history to reconstruct a memory.

This ability to go back to my childhood memories, my old long-lost friendships, relationships that broke my heart all bring this human element to my writing that pattern matching words cannot create.

And this leads me to what I've lost most profoundly in my AI-assisted writing.

The Loss of Feeling

My writing with AI will read much more intellectually; probably refined too, but I don't know if I "feel" something when I read it. I tried to read it and felt nothing. Stories like the ones I wrote about Sisyphus and Bhutan, Myanmar and loss of love all stir something in me even if I read them the 10th time. That connection is lost right now.

The human capacity to experience their memories is something that made my writing a lot more natural and emotional. AI can mimic emotions but that artificiality shows in the final output.

Now that I don't lean on my memories to write, those moments where my imagination went wild as I leaned on the past or future have also gone missing with this problem.

When I wrote before, something wonderful in terms of a life lesson or learning always awaited me when I completed writing my memo. The effects of memory restoration and reconstruction kicked in and my brain replayed the memory to give me a new insight or to make me feel loved, or feel cared for. Now that I think about it, that is exactly the part about writing that made me happy and fulfilled.

I should note here that my perspective comes from a particular place of privilege.

Livelihood vs. Creative Pursuit

The point to note is that I research and write for personal reasons and do not get paid for it, so this argument and whole mental breakdown is because writing is a pure creative pursuit for me, not a means to make a living.

For those who use writing as a way of livelihood, I will reserve my comments and judgments, for I am not one to sit in my ivory tower complaining about your ability to earn good bread for your family today.

Given all of this, I find myself at a crossroads.

Retreating Back?

I am contemplating completely going back to free-flow writing with my natural tone of voice; even if it isn't fine-tuned to the model's high standards of publishing.

In a world where nothing remains the same even in the next second, a part of me writes to preserve my own "being" at the time of writing a "certain thing" or to capture an experience I am living in the present moment.

Writing is my way of capturing an important moment, like photographs. I don't think I will ever delegate my ability to capture a beautiful sunset or my father's smile when he sees me come home after a long time. I can buy a better camera or learn to take better photos but I will never allow anyone else to capture those moments for me.

If I ever did that, it would be a loss, a tragedy to the essence of my existence.

The reality is that without more raw intelligence, better writing will feel like a lucky find from prompting rather than genuine discovery. And discovery, not optimisation, is why I write.

Signing off, Kalyani Khona