Everything starts with a thought.
Sometimes it’s a big thought. Sometimes it’s a small thought. Sometimes it arrives while you’re in the shower and disappears the moment you find a towel, leaving you with the feeling that you’ve solved something important but no useful information about what.
Then comes the job of getting that thought into somebody else’s head.
For this, we developed language. Language is a technology, although we don’t tend to think of it that way because nobody charges us £19 a month to use verbs.
Writing allowed us to preserve our thoughts and share them with people who weren’t there. This was a huge advance for humanity, followed some time later by the reply-all email.
A camera is a medium. You see something, point the camera at it and make choices about what you want another person to see.
AI is a medium too.
It shapes how we express things. We bring something to it, work with it, make decisions and, with luck, produce something worth sharing.
We use AI for video. We use AI for music. But say you’ve used it to help write something and someone will react as though you’ve entered the Tour de France on a forklift.
“You didn’t write that.”
Well, let’s talk about what happened.
I had a thought. I wrote some notes. The notes were a mess because my thoughts rarely arrive in neat paragraphs. They arrive like people trying to get off a bus.
I worked through them. Asked questions. Tried different ways of explaining things. Read sentences and deleted them. Put things back. Changed my mind.
At some point, I had to decide whether the words said what I meant.
That feels like work to me.
There’s a romantic idea about writing that says it should involve suffering. A person alone in a room, battling a blank page, sustained by coffee and a growing resentment of everyone having a nice time outside.
I understand the appeal. It makes a better film than somebody saying, “That paragraph’s a bit vague. Let’s have another go.”
But I’m not convinced the reader benefits from knowing I had a miserable afternoon.
Nobody has ever recommended an article to me by saying, “You must read this. Apparently the author had a terrible time.”
They say it’s funny. Or useful. Or that it helped them understand something.
That’s what I want from writing too.
Now, it is easy to create slop with AI.
You can type “write a thought-provoking article about innovation” and receive twelve paragraphs in which nothing is thought about and nobody is provoked.
There will probably be a landscape. It will be evolving.
But it’s easy to create slop without AI.
Humans invented the corporate mission statement unaided. We held meetings, formed committees and spent actual money arriving at “empowering excellence through solutions”.
We have to take responsibility for that one.
AI makes it possible to produce bad writing much faster. This is a problem, given that we were already keeping up with demand.
But access to the same tool doesn’t mean everyone will produce the same work.
Give two people a camera and send them out for the afternoon. One might return with a photograph that makes you stop and look. The other might return with 46 pictures of a duck.
I would be the duck person. I would insist several of them were different.
The camera matters. So do the choices.
With writing, you still need something to say. You need to notice things. You need to question your own argument, check your facts and recognise when a sentence sounds good but contains absolutely nothing.
You need to know when the words have drifted away from what you meant.
AI can produce a confident paragraph about almost anything. You’re the one who has to decide whether you believe it enough to put your name underneath it.
And then stand behind it when someone asks a question.
You can’t hide.
You might get away with a polished opening. But if there’s no thought behind it, sooner or later the reader reaches for the door handle and discovers you’ve built a house consisting entirely of porch.
The people who put the work in will show us something. An experience we haven’t had. A connection we hadn’t made. A familiar feeling expressed in a way that helps us understand it.
That work can happen with AI.
It can also happen with a notebook, a keyboard or a pencil you’ve been chewing for reasons that do not bear examination.
There are fair arguments to have about AI, including how it’s trained and whose work it uses. But “you used AI” tells me very little about whether a piece of writing deserves my time.
Show me the writing.
Make me laugh. Help me understand. Give me something I’m still thinking about when I close the page.
Everything starts with a thought.
You still have to bring one.
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