Using AI to “express” your thoughts misses the whole point of writing.

The entire argument for using AI for polish, to translate ideas into words that are intelligible to other humans, rests on the shaky assumption that writing is merely a process of expression. Fun fact: it’s not.

To prompt an AI to convert bullets into prose skips the entire process of thinking through writing, reducing it to nothing more than transmission. In this simplified model, it goes from thoughts to words, which a reader recognizes as language and then translates into thoughts again. It assumes that all the thinking has already happened before the very first keystroke.

But you don’t truly know what you’re thinking until you have written it down. Thoughts swirl around like a messy, formless soup in your head, easy to lose or change without tangible rules to govern them. We write to have an externalized object to which we can direct that thinking.

These objects of cognition can be seen, inspected, and manipulated in ways that are simply too difficult to do with pure thought as millions of neurons fire at 200 miles an hour.

Writing represents ideas encountering reality for the first time, and seeing if it survives. The seeing — that’s the most important part. Unloading onto paper frees up your head, allowing you to dissect and critique your own thoughts with as much rigor as you would others’. You recognize the gaps that weren’t previously visible. You detect the contradictions hidden by the fleetingness of it all. The physicality of the text, whether on a notebook or a Macbook, enables you to analyze your ideas and learn from them — learn from them things you didn’t already know.

Writing is, in fact, generative. Not just generative in the sense of verbalizing finished thoughts, but generative of thought itself.

In many ways, I find writing to be a revelatory experience. I never open a blank document fully knowing what I’m going to write, but I always close it surprised by what I discover. When I began developing contestivism, I had a strong one-liner and fragments of what I didn’t yet realize would become a framework for analyzing social reality. The rest was revealed through writing, taking form on the page as an eventual 10,000-word articulation.

Never outsource your thinking to AI. And by thinking, I mean writing.