I’ve been struggling to diagnose the prejudice against the use of AI among many people, including when it comes to AI helping with one’s prose. I find the preoccupation asinine, superficial, and ultimately a signal of a lack of substance.
In my world, it’s all about the idea. As a theorist, I’m good at finding ideas, and at providing evidence and arguments for them.
Getting an idea written up in the best form for an audience is a needed further task. It’s important. It needs to be done. Over the years, I got good at explaining my ideas. But if I could make that task easier — with a writer always at my side whom I trusted, who grasped my work and could explain it really well — I’d leap at the opportunity. More time to work on what I’m all about!
And so AI comes along, and it’s currently really, REALLY good at grasping existing ideas, and also exceedingly good at explaining them to others. Sure, its prose often has its own look that we’ve learned to recognize, but I don’t care about that. Do you understand the idea? That’s what matters.
If you’re the type to fuss, “Did an AI help you write up your idea?”, you’re not the audience. You’re just about the presentation, and not even in a substantive sense. “Sure, the prose really does explain the point well. But, muh, I can tell it’s gone through an LLM.” 👏 👏 Good job missing the point — missing the substance.
If you write a piece, I want to (i) understand what you’re trying to say, and (ii) grasp what, if anything, the new idea is. What I do NOT give a crap about is whether you used AI to help get your point across better.
That is one of the brilliant consequences of AI: those interested in breaking genuinely new ground can focus more of their time on exactly that.
But, some may ask, isn’t AI also generating the idea?
No. Not even a little. Except in highly formal realms like mathematics, LLMs are NOT currently good at finding substantively novel ideas. And, as I have argued, LLMs are likely some ways from getting good at breaking genuinely new ground, especially in the sciences.
We’ve had spell-checkers since the late 1970s, grammar and style checkers since the 1980s, and increasingly sophisticated word processors helping rewrite sentences since the 1990s. Now we have AI that can help with prose at the whole-paragraph level and beyond.
The “AI sLoP!” screamers are the grannies bragging about how things were done in their heyday.
The interesting question was never whether a machine touched the words. The interesting question is: What did you contribute?
Did you discover something? Did you have an idea worth communicating? Did you find the evidence for it, work out the argument, see something the rest of us hadn’t seen? Or did you ask an AI to come up with the substance too?
Those are profoundly different things. Collapsing them into the single question “Did you use AI?” is about as superficial an assessment of intellectual work as one could imagine.
In fact, AI should push us in precisely the opposite direction. As producing competent prose becomes cheaper, we should care less about who physically assembled each sentence and more about where the ideas came from.
That’s the great opportunity here. Let the machines help with the parts they’re good at. Spend more human time on the parts they’re not.
Find something new.
Then explain it as well as you possibly can — no matter who does the explaining, your hired writer or an LLM.