Today’s post is something I wrote for the New Yorker—available here. (Physical copy coming out next week.) It’s about the consequences of using AI to cure loneliness. I’m curious to see what people think of my arguments, and can’t wait to engage with the discussion in the comments section.
This was a tough one to write. In my pitch, I outlined the structure of the article I hoped to send in. It took a miserable few weeks before I realized that what I planned wasn’t any good. Other ideas emerged that seemed more promising, and so the article ended up going in an unexpected direction.
This isn’t the first time this sort of thing has happened. At least for me, writing is a form of thinking—the need to put my ideas into words helps me see what works and what doesn’t. A lot of things sound good in my head—and when I tell them to a friend or pitch them to an editor—and then I write them down, look at what I’ve written, and conclude, Well, that’s an awful lot of bullshit. Then I rethink and rewrite and rethink and rewrite. Writing keeps me honest and makes me smarter.
This is one of the million things that’s lost when AI does your work for you. I could have put my proposal into ChatGPT, given it an extended prompt, and fed in a dozen scientific papers, and it would have spat out a first draft for me to get started on. But then I would have never confronted the fact that these ideas were flawed from the very start.1
In a recent piece called Credit the Editors, I complained that magazines have a culture where everything gets attributed to the author—the work that others do is uncredited. My Substack has a different culture. I thank Henry Finder for his wise and meticulous editorial work, and Azim Shariff, Christina Starmans, and particularly Mickey Inzlicht for continuing discussion of these ideas.
In Six Ways I Use AI for Writing, I discuss other ways I use AI to help my writing. I also point out certain cases where I do use it to write actual drafts.
I sometimes have to fill out administrative forms that nobody will read, where they ask for summaries of courses I’ve already taught or descriptions of job candidates who have already been hired. I might throw a syllabus or CV at Claude, ask for something that’s the right number of words, give it a quick look, and send it in. As Abraham Maslow once put it, What’s not worth doing isn’t worth doing well.