The author describes using AI to generate questions and a deliberately poor first draft as a technique to overcome writer's block and memory issues, resulting in faster writing without any AI-written text in the final product.
I'll concede that many of them are: I've certainly seen instances in which someone copy-pasted what they got from a chatbot and called it a day. But that's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about uses of AI for writing in which the final product has zero text produced by the chatbot. My weakness (which existed long before AI) is memory. A way that AI has helped me is to get it to prompt me so that I can find out what I know. In a recent project, I had to write a paper about a data analysis that I did a few months ago, and looking over the code I wrote and the presentations I gave about it wasn't ringing any bells—it might as well have been somebody else's work. So I pointed a coding agent at those files and asked it to ask me a hundred detailed questions, from which it was to write a first draft. Note: I never had any intention of using that draft, but saying so focused the goal. I have no qualms about lying to a robot. They were all good questions. It took me the better part of a day to answer them all with a few paragraphs each. Apparently, my memory is such that if asked, "Tell me about this project," I draw a blank, but if asked, "Why did you do this here?" I can answer right away. It came back in details first, and from those details I could reconstruct in my mind the big picture. By the time I finished answering those questions, I was ready to write. But still it was helpful that the AI had written a draft, particularly because it was such a bad draft. Have you ever heard of the trick in which you can get somebody to work on something by saying, "Don't worry, I'll do it," and then doing a bad job of it? A certain type of person is triggered to fix something if they see it done badly, though they wouldn't have done it if nothing existed at all. I'm one of those people, and getting AI to make a bad draft is a way of playing that trick on myself. "Let me show you how it's done" is a strong motivator, even if the one being schooled is a robot. In all, it took two days to write the paper, which is pretty quick for this sort of thing. No words from the AI ended up in the final paper even though I had them both in the same file and replaced them little by little like a Ship of Theseus. From past experience, I can say that without AI, this would have taken much longer, but not for good reasons. Those extra days would have been spent procrastinating because I was unable to get my head into it. Maybe this technique is particular to me and my bad memory, but I'll bet there are other legitimate uses of AI for writing—uses other than "Write it for me."
The article argues that AI's greatest value in writing may be in aiding cognition and creativity rather than generating finished text, serving as a creativity amplifier.
A writer shares a year-long experiment using AI to write a book, finding that generating text directly fails but using AI to analyze and improve one's own writing holds real value.
An opinion piece discusses how labeling real art as AI-generated leads to false critiques, and argues that 'slop' is defined by lack of human story, not AI involvement.
The article explores the current state of AI-generated writing, its detection, and the implications for education and literature, referencing the Granta controversy where a story suspected to be AI-written won a prize.
The author proposes using AI as a research moderation and synthesis tool rather than a content generator to combat 'AI slop.' By building a pipeline that compares and ranks expert sources, the author argues the future human role in AI is curation and judgment.