No, I don’t want AI to write for me

by | Updated Feb 3, 2025 | Technology

Takeaway: You become a better writer by actually writing—not by writing and then leaning on AI to clean up everything you wrote. Technology can help us become better writers. But we shouldn’t be leaning on it for the heavy lifting—especially when writing well is an essential skill and component of knowledge work.

Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes, 44s.

I write for a living. So, you should probably take everything I say here with a grain of salt. But I don’t want to ever rely on AI to help me write. And I don’t think you should, either.

Writing well is a skill that we should all develop. On her most recent (not to mention great) album, Sabrina Carpenter has a song called Slim Pickins about how all the good men seem to be either “deceased or taken.” These lines of the song stuck out to me the other day:

Jesus, what’s a girl to do?

This boy doesn’t even know the difference between there, their, and they are

Good spelling and grammar (not to mention being “jacked and kind”) isn’t just the way to Sabrina Carpenter’s heart. It’s a necessary skill to function as a human being. If you do knowledge work, you will need to write—constantly. The more you lean on AI to help you write, the less you lean on yourself. Writing is a skill you need to have.

Not all of us are strong writers. But we become better writers by actually writing—not by writing terribly and then leaning on AI to shape our scrambled mess into something great.

I’m always wary when anyone takes an “anti-tech” stance on anything. I don’t have (or want to have) some Old Man Yells at Cloud attitude with AI, as overhyped as it can sometimes be. Artificial intelligence will be transformative in ways we will be uncomfortable with and will have to adapt to. But the point still stands that writing is an essential skill. We won’t always have AI to correct our typos.

When you offload your work to a calculator, you save time and no longer have to make complex calculations in your head. Sure, you may lose the skill of doing long division in your head. But you gain back time and energy. In situations where you need a calculator, you can get one.

But AI writing feels very different from using a calculator to help us multiply things. When a piece of software takes what you have written and completely changes it, you may end up with something that is technically perfect. But you lose yourself—and more importantly your voice—in the process.

Next to speaking, writing is the most basic way that we can express ourselves. Whenever we write, we have a “voice” that comes through in our writing—whether we realize it or not. This voice is our personality, a reflection of who we are. Our voice is always there, whether or not we choose to develop it. Recently, I went back and read some of the older articles I had written on my site. Back then, young(er) Chris thought those articles were perfect. Today, I only see past-Chris as a terrible writer and can see how far I’ve come.

We should all feel this way about not only our work—but also our writing.

But more than being able to improve, we all deserve to have a voice in our writing. We should all be able to express ourselves through words in our own unique way.

Just as I would never allow AI to speak for me verbally, I will not allow it to write for me. We all speak a certain way that is true to who we are. Writing is the same.

This all begs the question: how far should a grammar checker go?

Personally? I want an app that’ll catch the dumb stuff. Typos, punctuation where it shouldn’t be, things that aren’t clear, that kind of thing. Each time I make a typo in one of these articles, I get a couple dozen messages about the mistake. I’m appreciative of this (honestly). But I’d even greater preference to not make dumbest mistakers in the first place.

Spelling and grammar are fair game for a writing proofing tool. Offering suggestions in a way that helps me learn to become a better and more correct writer is also nice, as Grammarly does (I use it with all the AI features turned off, and ignore any suggestions that will dull my voice). We all need to become better writers and should have support in this pursuit. I also benefit from this as someone who writes books for a living—though I stubbornly didn’t use Grammarly to check my last one after they announced AI-powered grammar-checking features.

But rewriting stuff? Or turning the voice that I am developing in my writing into textbook-sounding pablum?

No thanks.

I’d rather write like Chris.

Written by Chris Bailey

Chris Bailey has written hundreds of articles on the subject of productivity and is the author of three books: How to Calm Your Mind, Hyperfocus, and The Productivity Project. His books have been published in more than 40 languages. Chris writes about productivity on this site and speaks to organizations around the globe on how they can become more productive without hating the process.

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