Writing is thinking, and AI is doing it for you

Most people treat writing like it's the step after thinking, like you figure out what you want to say and then you write it down. But I don't think it works like that.

Writing is the process through which you discover what you think, because when you try to put a half-formed idea into words you're forced to confront whether you understand it or whether you've just been carrying around a vague sense that you do. Peterson talks about this a lot and I think he's right: you don't think first and write second, you think by writing.

You don't think first and write second. You think by writing.

That's what bothers me about people outsourcing their writing to AI. It's not that the output is bad, it's often fine, but you're skipping the part where your thinking gets stress-tested. The messy draft where your argument falls apart, the paragraph you cut because it was filler, the sentence you rewrite four times before you land on what you mean.

All of that looks like inefficiency but it seems to me the most valuable part of the process, because that's where critical thinking gets built. You have to separate the wheat from the chaff yourself, and that requires sitting in the discomfort of not knowing what you think until the writing tells you.

I'm not saying don't use AI. I use it. But I think you should know what you're trading away when you let it do your writing for you, because polished words without the thinking behind them is just performative not authentic.