I agree that outsourcing critical thinking is an issue, but I’m not sure that is an automatic outcome of using a tool like this.
The flip side is that some people just struggle with writing. I’ve worked with many of them. Smart/capable people, for whom the process of writing is an impediment to clear thought, with many mental cycles spent on the act of writing itself and remembering the rules of punctuation and spelling to the detriment of the idea they’re trying to convey.
They feel about AI writing tools the way I feel about generative AI image tools: excited that I can get better at visually conveying ideas that I don’t have the artistic ability to draw on my own.
> but allowing your creativity to atrophy sounds like a recipe for a terminally boring society
This is a binary outlook on the impact of these tools and I’d pose these followup questions:
- Is a creative person who is driven to do creative things going to lose that drive, or use AI tools as a force multiplier?
- Is there a reason to believe that the act of writing itself is always a creative endeavor and not just an outward/visual manifestation of thought/and ideas? (Note: I’m not claiming that writing is never creative, or that creativity is never involved in the organization of the words themselves, but this is distinct from the underlying ideas themselves, and not always the most important factor).
- I don’t think anyone would argue that a thesaurus or dictionary, or tools like spell check/autocorrect risk stripping someone of their creativity, but what would it look like to define the line between creative thought and expression of those thoughts?
- Most people don’t “create” today, mostly because it’s hard work. Argument about “boring content that lacks creativity” aside, can we be so sure that lowering the barrier to entry atrophies creativity instead of opening new avenues for it to thrive?