Don't Let AI Do Your Writing for You

There's much to gain by writing things yourself—and much to lose when you outsource it. Here's why entrepreneurs need to be writers.

- by ELIZABETH WARDLE

Every single step of an entrepreneurial journey happens through some form of writing—from early pitches to later marketing campaigns, from contracts to plans. The academic phrase for this is: “Writing mediates your activities.” In other words, writing helps you get things done.

But many people have a vexed relationship with writing. They remember their high school teacher’s red pen, the five-paragraph essay, and their anxiety over high-stakes writing tests. They remember memorizing rules that they then didn’t get quite right, and hear voices in their heads telling them they are better at math, or asking why they didn’t learn to write properly in their English classes. For these people, writing is something they would prefer to avoid.

For anxious writers, a tool like ChatGPT might feel like a godsend. After all, why wouldn’t you want to get those writing tasks out of the way without the struggle? If a new tool can do the work for you, why not take advantage? If AI can give you 10 new marketing slogans or draft a contract in 10 seconds, why not let it? You can skip the replay of your high school English teacher’s voice in your head, stop worrying about comma splices, and just let the technology take over.

There's no doubt that AI will be—already is—part of our writing lives going forward. But we lose something when we blindly embrace new writing tools, skip the composing process entirely, and run away from our bad experiences with writing.

The first thing we lose by relying too much on AI is one of the major functions of writing: human connection. Do you remember the ad Google ran during the Olympics (“Dear Sydney”) suggesting kids should use AI to write a letter explaining their admiration for Olympians? Sports writer Shehan Jeyarajah wrote: “Their pitch is really, ‘Hey, we can feel and express emotions so your daughter doesn’t have to.’” And there was a strong public outcry against the ad.