L.M. Sacasas (2024-06-11). The Work of Art.
…certain forms of labor, tedious and mundane though they may appear, are nonetheless essential to the work of being an artist… my writing, while at times certainly impeded by other labors, is, on the whole, improved by those same labors, chiefly because they tether my thought to the world and shape me in a manner that is conducive to clarity of thought and purpose.
I’ve talked before about the idea that writing is the process by which I come to understand what I think. And that if I replace my writing with content generation by AI, then I’m effectively removing one of the channels I use to think.
The excerpt above is a reminder that it’s precisely the (sometimes) “tedious and mundane” forms of labour that are “conducive to clarity of thought and purpose”.
Engaging in the cognitively difficult, time-consuming, critical thinking parts of writing, supported by genAI as a thinking partner, may help to produce higher quality pieces, as opposed to seeing it simply as a way to produce more content.