Some thoughts, some notions, and a variation on the Ship of Theseus for AI.
Consider two scenarios:
- You write something down. Then, one sentence at a time, you ask Grammarly or Claude or something else to revise it.
- You prompt an AI for an essay. Then, one sentence at a time, you revise it.
At the end of the two scenarios you have a finalized document that has been handled by both you and AI. They feel very different though, right?
In case 1, you, in the act of writing version one, commit your thoughts to paper, and then hand off the editing, reshaping, reformulation process to an AI. Alice Ji did a cool experiment on how ownership feelings vary when AI does more edits. In case 2, you still kick things off (via a prompt), but then you leave the generation to AI and you handle the editing and revising. It’s the exact opposite scenario of the “Ship of Theseus” thought experiment that you usually see when considering AI-assisted writing. At what point does a human take ownership of the document, if the first draft came from an AI?
I don’t know how it ties in, but there is a well-known concept from the writer Anne Lamott known as the shtty first draft. Writers always want you writing earlier than you think you should, so that you can get the words out there and begin the hard work of editing, refining, and reformulating. Well, what if you let AI write your shtty first draft? It doesn’t feel the same, but I don’t know if that’s because it’s worse or just because it’s different. If I write my sh*tty first prompt, then get to work on edits, refinements, tangents, etc., am I writing?
To add another wrinkle: I was intentionally vague at the beginning when I said that you write something down. Surely, if the something is a poem changes the framing of this compared to if the something is a product specification. And, always remember, the you part is the most important part.