PSA: Don’t Outsource Your Writing to AI
In the world of AI, it is just too easy to outsource your writing to an LLM model. Ask Gemini (2.5 pro - my favorite model) to write on an idea you’ve been thinking about and bam - you’ll have a pretty good finished product on your hands.
But what have you really achieved through this? A piece of writing that is mostly fluff to your brain. Why is it fluff? It’s fluff not because of the writing style or content (on the contrary I’ve seen Gemini excellent metaphors and analogies with the right prompting), it’s fluff because your brain hasn’t spent anytime on figuring out those words. It’s not spent any time figuring out structure, arguments, contradictions, other connections & examples etc. Your brain has simply read AI’s input. It has not spent time thinking about the idea. When you try to speak about the topic to someone else, you’ll notice the glaring gaps in your understanding of the topic.
“But I’ve ‘written’ about this” - your brain will say. You’re only fooling yourself. You’ve only read about your idea, but you haven’t built the scafolding around it to truly understand it. This is what Jordan Peterson says about the writing process -
“To summarize what I’ve learned, I need to iron out the contradictions between what I’ve learned, and I need to elegantly formulate that. I need to get my word choice right, my phrase choice right, and my sentence choice right. I need to organize the sentences into proper paragraphs, and the paragraphs into proper sequence so that I have a coherent argument. At the same time, what you’re doing is integrating your own personality at the highest and most abstract level of organization. You’re sharpening your tools, and you’re putting yourself straight because you’re learning to think. You learn to do that by writing.”
“You learn to think by writing. Now, there’s more to read, to speak, and all of that, but the best thing you can do is read and write every day. A couple of hours every day, write about things you find important, and see if you can discover what you believe to be true. That’ll build you a foundation, and it’s unbelievably practical. Like, if you look at people who are phenomenally successful across life, there are various reasons, but one of them is that they’re unbelievably good at articulating what they’re aiming at, strategizing, negotiating, and enticing people with a vision forward. It’s like Get your words together, man; that makes you unstoppable.”
If you want to be a better communicator, learn to improve your persuasion skills through writing. When your writing is clear, your thinking is clear and your ideas become powerful. Shane Parrish explores this idea in his book Clear Thinking.
This is not to say that AI shouldn’t be leveraged at all. Personally, I think AI can help writing in the following ways -
1/ Research
AI is an excellent research partner - as long as you double check the sources it’s referencing. To make sure that I don’t break my flow of writing, I’ll add some sort of placeholder where I don’t know the exact dates, or even the exact story that I’m writing about. After my writing session, I’ll go back to that document and ask AI to help me fill out the research behind those placeholders etc. This is a massive time save for me.
2/ Editing
Since I’m just getting back into writing to this blog again, I want to make sure that I’m improving with each piece I put out here. After I craft these handwritten notes, I ask AI to grade the writing. Pro tip - don’t tell AI that you’re the author of the writing to remove the bias. You can continue prompting the AI to help you understand where you can improve your piece.
P.S. - I’m just getting started here but in a future piece I’ll cover the details of how to tune a AI to get A+ feedback on your writing.
3/ Admin Writing
Everyone has some admin writing to do - answering emails with definite answers, notes from meetings, etc. If the outcome of this kind of writing doesn’t necessarily improve your thinking - you should export that to AI.
I like what David Perell had to say about this on the TBPN podcast -
“All forms of pure-utility writing will be done by AI. Business memos, emails from lawyers, etc, work that is not about the art of writing or maximizing the quality of thinking. By the end of 2026 or 2027, we can assume that (they are written by AI).”
In summary, develop a writing habit to improve your thinking. Don’t outsource the job of writing to AI. Think of it as going to the gym and exercising your brain. Carefully use AI to give your writing practice leverage through editing and research. And finally, for all the non-essential admin writing - export that to AI. Get quick at it and you’ll reap the right rewards. I also recommend reading my notes on How to Take Smart Notes and How to Be a Writer. I’ve also written about how AI can be leveraged for coding in my post on Cursor.