Is Your Writing a Product or a Process?

And what AI's got to do, got to do with it

Hey, ChatGPT, can you write —

Just kidding.

I don’t like using generative AI to write. The idea in itself already annoys me.

But, I admit I am biased. I write professionally and recreationally. I have been writing for a while. I write in different formats. Being stuck in a writing-and-thinking loop is one of my fleeting handful of personal peak experiences¹.

“I can shake off everything as I write; my sorrows disappear, my courage is reborn.”
― Anne Frank

Why does this make me uncomfortable with AI-generated writing?

Some people see writing as a product. For them, generative AI tools are hacks that spit out slick and sleek marketing copy. Sure, there may be mistakes, repetitive sentence structures, and the quality may be so-so, but that’s not the point. No, clicking ‘publish’ faster and more often is the goal. Such is the price of success in an attention economy that stuffs content down our collective throats faster than we can swallow. I respect the hustle, I do. If writing is the product, then using AI tools is the smart idea. There’s a reason these tools are marketed as productivity aids.

If I sounded a bit sharp in the previous paragraph, that’s because 1) I once turned myself into a blade and still possess leftover sharpness, and 2) to me, writing carries a certain emotional weight. I care about writing, both as a noun and a verb. Why?

Some people see writing not as a product, but as a process. For these people (and yes, I count myself among them), doing the writing is valuable because through doing it they (we) structure our thoughts, arrive at new insights, and (perhaps) exorcise our demons². We use the lines and curves of letters to build bridges to kindred spirits, one painstaking syntactic brick at a time. For these people, outsourcing their writing to unthinking software tools is not the smart choice. It may even feel like sacrilege. If your heart beats punctuation marks and pushes ink through your veins, seeing silicon copywriting flood the marketplace of regurgitated ideas is a symptom of a systemic disease.

“There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.”
― Ernest Hemingway

No one is right or wrong. It’s about perspective. It’s about what writing means (or doesn’t mean) to you.

It’s also not an all-or-nothing story.

After all, I put my writing online, ask you to subscribe, and - sacrilege! - even nudge you to consider a paid subscription if that’s an option for you.

(Wait. Is that… is that a button? I wonder what happens when you click it…?)

In my view, everyone lands somewhere on the spectrum between pure product (“Hey, ChatGPT, create 100 LinkedIn posts tailored for maximum engagement”) and only process (*scribbles in a handmade secret journal that remains behind lock, key, and iris scanner*). Calling your writing partially a product might annoy you. But I’d argue that if you share your writing at all, it’s not just about the process of writing. You may not want to call ‘the thing beyond the process’ in your writing a product (I sure don’t want to), but in the attention economy, people’s eyes on your writing are valuable. If attention is currency, what we publish becomes - to an extent - a commodity.

I think that where you land on the product-process spectrum closely aligns with how comfortable you are with using AI tools for your writing. More product-based writers will feel less compunction using those tools; process writers will be more reluctant. The former gain something by using generative AI, the latter lose something.

“Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.”
― Virginia Woolf

Despite my obvious (and obviously biased) stance on generative AI tools, I am not blind to their potential use cases³. Doing the writing matters to me, but does that make our friendly chatbots by definition useless? I don’t know. Could I use them to summarize the background reading I’m doing for my posts? Can I benefit from an AI editor? An artificial sounding board? Again, I don’t know.

What I do know is that my (personal) writing doesn’t have to be streamlined and steamrolled into a perfectly average mush. The imperfection, the statistical deviation⁴ is the point; my words reflect my flawed self at the moment of writing. They are a testimony to me falling and getting up, being pushed and pushing back; they are my silent rebellion, the embers of me that remain alight in the wasteland. My words can be sharp and jagged, soft and cuddly, musical and playful. They are exactly what they need to be at this moment. They are not the statistically most likely next token; the lines that assemble into letters are the faultlines of my ever-changing self and the frontlines of the internal battle.

“You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.”
― Ray Bradbury

Each word above is 100% organic, human-born, and raised in biological gray matter. In the age of the AI content flood, surely that’s a delicacy…

Thanks for stopping by,

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Related thoughts

Writing in the Age of AI, Plus Boutique Humanity

Language Games and Jungle Writing

1. I’ll let you guess the other ones…

2. Three parenthesized qualifiers in a single sentence without a prompt telling me to do so? Applause, please. Your move, ChatGPT.

3. I’ll also say that similar machine learning models have interesting use cases in data-heavy fields such as genomics, etc. I’m not at all anti-AI; just critical of its often shortsighted use in creating writing and graphical ‘products’.

4. I’d make the case that sometimes choosing the less obvious word or expression is exactly what makes someone’s writing shine. (Also, wordplay for the win.)