What AI is Doing to Our Thinking

On Language Control, LLMs, and the Cost of Frictionless Writing

…When language resolves too quickly, the brain gets lazy. We move from generative to evaluative modes of thinking, in which we no longer create but judge. We start to see things in black and white before gray matter has had time to ignite.

Similarly, when we let AI write for us, we give up associative exploration and ambiguity. We stop wrestling with ideas, weighing possibility, or feeling into our ethics and morals to discover what we actually think. I charge more for editing when an author has used AI because I have to reopen pathways of thought that have been cemented shut by densely packed syntax and logic. I have to re-invoke the tension and voice and mood that have been drowned out by the droning of certainty.

The most unsettling thing about AI isn’t what it writes, but what it prevents us from thinking and writing on our own. Hand it a human draft, and it refuses all hints of dissension or gaps in logic and insists on uniformity of length and breadth.

It doesn’t acknowledge the bias you are consciously choosing to have. Take this essay, for example. I’ve already talked about potatoes, Brazilian blowouts, gray matter, and particle board, and I’m about to talk about cults and sex. AI doesn’t do that. It doesn’t even let you do that. And that’s the real danger this article is getting at.