Why I'm not using AI to be more productive

At the end of this month, I’m being released from a long-term writing contract with a tech company. That job has recently involved using AI tools, but now that I’m on my own I need to consider what kind of writing I want to do. In fact, I think anyone trying to be a writer today needs to think about the role of AI in their work—even if that’s no role at all.

Whether or not AI ends up being a net positive for the labor market, the benefits for companies and for the writers themselves are largely opposed. Good writing is tricky, personal, unpredictable, and hard to replicate and scale. If AI can boost productivity that’s clearly good for the company. But for the individual if you’re suddenly twice as productive, you don’t get half your time off. Increased productivity is another way of saying higher workload.

I understand why employers are pushing for AI adoption, and maybe years from now working without an AI agent on your computer will be like working without WiFi, with all that entails. But I don’t have the incentives or motivations of a corporation. I’m trying to write things that interest me, partly because I hope people will read them, and partly because writing them is a way of being that I want to cultivate. Increasing my productivity with AI doesn’t resolve my actual difficulties with the writing process, while at the same time introducing many new concerns, such as:

• How good and how accurate is AI-assisted writing?

• Once you verify the output, is that substantially easier or better than just writing it yourself?

• What are the ethics of using models that were trained on stolen data?

• How is liability assigned when a system produces outputs in unexplainable ways?

• Are the energy, environmental, economic and opportunity costs of AI worth accepting, both in general and for writing tasks in particular?

So I’m not using AI in my own writing and have no plans to. The limit on my writing is me. AI promises to increase that limit, but to what end? When I write something, my unique offering is a connection between my mind and yours. To whatever extent AI makes that unnecessary, it destroys the very thing I’m trying to provide.

Edit: I’m still getting the hang of posting, and I was advised that the original version of this post came across as bitter. That’s not the case—I have no hard feelings about a contract that was fair, stable, mutually beneficial, and lasted far longer than I originally expected.