I understand why people want you to write; because it’s good for you, because it focuses a wandering thought, because the first sentence is usually rubbish and the seventh is often better, because you learn cadence and structure and argument through repetition, because there are things you don’t know you believe until you try to explain them, and because spending an afternoon wrestling a stubborn idea into words can leave you with a stronger brain;no, i want you to write because i want your authentic input. i don't care what you get out of it.
but none of this explains why we’ve decided that the physical production of every word, one keystroke at a time, must now serve as a test of whether a thought is human.
well, if you didn't write it yourself then it guaranteed not to be human, that's why.
It’s daft.
there is no alternative.
It takes one useful method of thinking and promotes it into the only respectable one.
it is the only one. if you didn't write it, you didn't think it. you thought the prompt, but that's not what you are sharing.
It confuses the exercise with the outcome,
the exercise IS the outcome. if you didn't exercise it, you didn't produce it.
the labour with the intelligence,
the labor is the only proof of intelligence we have.
and the movement of fingers with the movement of a mind.
if you didn't move your fingers, then your mind didn't move either.
It asks whether someone typed every word themselves when it should ask whether they had something useful to say, whether they understood it, whether they made the important decisions, whether they checked the claims,
if you didn't type (or dictate) it yourself then
you didn't say anything. you didn't understand anything. you didn't decide anything. and i have no idea whether you checked the claims.
and whether they can defend the finished work when someone else asks what on earth they were talking about.
if you had written it all yourself, maybe you wouldn't have to defend it. and if you do defend an AI text, then why didn't you write that to begin with? that was the contribution i was looking for. but then how am i supposed to know that the defense is not also AI generated?
all the same is true if you cite a lot of other peoples writing without adding anything of your own. it may be the correct message, but it doesn't tell me anything about you. but at least i know that writing came from humans and if you cite them correctly i can interrogate them directly. AI writing does none of that.
i stopped reading after the first two paragraphs. i am pretty sure i could continue refuting everything line by line.
(one more because i think i have a clever response:)
A person can type 3,000 words by hand and have no thought pass through their head beyond the need to finish before lunch.
yes, that is a possibility, even if not very likely. if you paste AI output however it is a certainty.
Another can dictate an idea, argue with a language model for an hour, reject six drafts, rearrange the whole piece, rewrite half of it, and publish something they understand down to the final comma. Under our emerging rules of literary customs inspection, the writing police see the first person as a human writer and the second as a suspicious package.
yes, you can do all that, that's called research. but it's only valuable if the final conclusion is written by yourself.
that's the same as writing a paper where you read lot's of other papers to research a topic. you can't just create an amalgamation of the texts you read. the conclusion has to be your own.