Something to push against.

My last post didn't start entirely as mine. It began as a dig into AI and psychology, something I've wanted to explore for a while given my background in coaching. I ran the question across a range of AI tools to compare what each made of it. Out of that came a theme, and a first draft with the studies in the right order and a few lines I liked. Then I rewrote nearly all of it. Not because it was bad, but because it was factual and impersonal, with nothing of me in it. By the time it went out it had my thank yous in it, my perspective, and a respect for the design of these tools that wasn't in the draft. It was mine. But it was also, without doubt, better for having been drafted first.

And that last bit is what I really want to talk about, because I don't think it's what people usually mean when they say AI helps them write.

The obvious opinion is that it saves you time. It does the first draft and you tidy it up, or the other way round. But honestly, that isn't why the draft mattered. It mattered because it gave me something to push against.

I've realised I write to work out what I think, and I find that so much easier against a page that's already got words on it. That's just me though, some people think it all through and write it down once, and I'm more than a bit jealous of them! For the way my head works, even a very average first draft does two things. It pulls my jumbled, half-formed thoughts into some sort of shape, then sits in front of me so I can argue with it. I read it back and something goes no, not that, more like this. And that "more like this" is the thing I wouldn't have found until I saw the version that got it wrong.

I'd never have written the line about the thank you being a full stop if there hadn't first been a worse one sitting there, annoying me. The draft wasn't the answer, it was just the thing that let me argue properly with my own thinking, and that argument is where the writing really happened.

So when I talk about the person staying in the process, I don't mean just checking the machine's homework at the end. Ideally I mean the whole thing being a back and forth. An idea goes in, a shape comes back, I react to it, a better one comes out, and round we go. For me it's more like thinking out loud with a good colleague than using a tool, with one difference. This colleague never minds being rewritten, and is happy for every decent line to end up as yours!

Which is why I've stopped worrying about whether using AI this way is somehow cheating. It gives me something to disagree with, and in my view the disagreeing is the actual work.

Me and the machine think in completely different ways, and working on the same thing together, we usually end up somewhere neither of us would have reached alone. Which does make me wonder why so many of us are still a bit reluctant to admit we work this way at all. Or is that just me?