I like writing. I think it’s easily one of the best things to have happened in my life. If I can confidently say I’m a little less stupid, it’s because of writing. Writing pushed me to read more, and reading more pushed me to write more. It became a kind of feedback loop.

But today, thanks to Greg Lelhans, anyone can write better than most writers. In fact, if someone has an interesting or thoughtful take, they can now produce writing as good as some of the best.

But the real question is: are they really writing? And the obvious answer is: they’re not. They’re relying on large language models.

The bigger question is: what’s the cost of relying on these tools? What do we lose when we stop wrestling with words ourselves? Maybe we lose the ability to think deeply, to wrestle with hard questions, to come up with clever formulations, to sit uncomfortably with uncertainty and be okay without answers.

I don’t know. I don’t have a good answer. But nonetheless, it’s the kind of question raised in an interesting essay by Michael Dean.

As we enter the age of artificial intelligence, it’s worth being honest about the shortcomings of the Enlightenment, education, and the essay; our existential problem isn’t about chatbots replacing our greatest authors, but that the median citizen will have no meaningful reason to write. All the occasions where we have to write are instrumental. Whether we’re writing an email, posting on social media, or drafting a contract, the words matter less than the results; writing is a social tool, a means to an end. As long as we weave together an acceptable, legible, and coherent sequence of characters and spaces, we might get what we want. Once we automate the menial act of “correspondence,” what reason is there to suffer over sentences? We can all just exchange machine-generated strings of text and leave capital-W Writing to the real Writers: the poets, memoirists, and novelists.

It’s plausible that most people won’t need to write in the near future; we might even celebrate the triumph. But writing and arranging words is the process of careful thinking. By offloading it, will we not atrophy the muscles of thought? We’ll each gain the illusion of competence, without even being aware of our cognitive amputation. We might lose our personal sovereignty in an age where we need it the most.

The human operating system is experiencing a scale, frequency, potency, and specificity of media that is psychologically overbearing. We are in, what David Foster Wallace called in 2007, an environment of “Total Noise.” When sensemaking gets stressful, it becomes tempting to outsource our thinking to “trusted” experts. When we do this, our worldview risks getting hijacked and programmed by algorithms, influencers, and power structures. If we submit to convenience, we fall into groupthink, but if we take the time to think and write through our circumstance, we earn back our agency.