Will AI make me lazy and bad at writing?

--> uncomfortable home truths

Yeah, it will.

It’s just a fact of life.

1. If there’s an easy route, most of us will take it.

2. If you do something regularly, you get better at it - if you don’t, you get worse.

Is it a bad thing?

I suspect so, for most of us.

I mean, if you don’t really want to write yourself and you’re just using it purely for marketing purposes then the fact that an AI (or a hired copywriter or the teenage son of your next door neighbour) does the writing instead isn’t a big deal.

But I definitely would like to be a decent writer.

I believe writing helps you think better. And it’s therapeutic too.

So while it’s wonderful that I can get the writing I need done much faster, and get way more of it done - I don’t want to lose my surprisingly coherent writing skills.

Here’s my strategy for keeping my skills:

Firstly, the good news is that by using AI to do more run-of-the-mill writing tasks, I have more energy to write the most interesting stuff - like this email.

I guess that’s not really a strategy. More of a “phew, it’s not so bad after all”.

But the strategy element is to take it a bit further and deliberately not use AI for writing tasks I think are interesting. Or at least not use AI to do the writing. The research, coming up with the odd phrase when I’m stuck¹ - great. But the main writing is mine.

But perhaps the most important strategy is to think through what writing it’s important for me to do - from my reader’s perspective.

I’m guessing a bit, of course, but for example, I reckon that:

• Subscribers to newsletters tend to read them both for information and amusement - a nice distraction in their inbox from all the pressures of work - so that’s where the writing needs to be as human as possible.

• Readers of articles that come from search engines probably have no idea who I am and are there mainly for the information and insights they searched for.

So while AI can definitely sound quite human, and quite like you if you prompt it right - if I want to build a personal relationship through my newsletter then at least some need to come from me.

And while it’ll do no harm to have personality and my own perspective injected into in-depth, factual articles - it’s probably a bit wasted since search engine visitors are coming for information rather than entertainment.

That mix sounds about right to me.

It’ll probably work for you too to keep your writing brain active and your skills refreshed, while allowing you to get much more written than before by harnessing AI where it’s best to use it.

- Ian

1. I couldn’t come up with the right phrase to describe my writing, so I asked Claude: