"The people who want AI to be off-limits are right that technology changes how you think and write."

"I am old enough to have done creative writing in longhand and then on a typewriter, before I got my first computer. Something was lost in each transition, because the slowness and forced rewriting of the old methods improved the text in certain ways. But they also raised the cost (in time and effort) of making changes, and ultimately most writers decided the new ways were worth it.... There will be artisanal holdouts who reject all those possibilities, but I doubt they’ll be a majority. So for the foreseeable future, the rest of us will be figuring out where to draw the lines, knowing that some lines will be crossed by others, if not erased entirely. The best we can hope for is that in the struggle to draw and redraw them, we’ll learn where they belong...."

Writes Megan McArdle, in "I told the internet I use AI. Boy, was it mad. Artificial intelligence helps you work harder, instead of just outsourcing your brain" (WaPo).

ADDED: I write so I can see what I think. I asked Grok, "Has anyone ever said, verbatim, 'I write so I can see what I think.'" The answer, I'm told, is no, but there's a similar expression, examined in the Quote Investigator article, "Quote Origin: I Do Not Know What I Think Until I Read What I’m Writing."

Notably, Flannery O'Connor wrote, in 1948: "What you say about the novel, Rinehart, advances, etc. sounds very good to me, but I must tell you how I work. I don’t have my novel outlined and I have to write to discover what I am doing. Like the old lady, I don’t know so well what I think until I see what I say; then I have to say it over again." So there was this mythic "old lady" who seems to have been regarded as a fool. In 1927, E. M. Forster wrote of an old lady who said, "How can I tell what I think till I see what I say?"

Why am I writing this as a postscript to McArdle's discussion of A.I.? It's because it explains something about how I've been using A.I.

First, there's the writing of the prompt. Right there, I'm able to see what I've been wondering about. That's valuable to me without seeing any response. I have an incentive to frame a question. Ah! Now, I'm remembering the old Blogger slogan: "How your mind looks on the web."

The prompt box — or whatever it's called in A.I. — is like the compose window in Blogger. With blogging you get — or might get — comments. With A.I., I always get a response, but it's not human. In both cases, the writing in the box feels alive. Whatever response I get from A.I. — or from blog comments — is an incentive to reshape my thoughts and to write again. Another prompt, another post. A.I., for me, is an exciting space for my own writing, which is to say, my own thinking.

The link on "How your mind looks on the web" on goes to a 2006 post of mine, How your mind looks on the web, part 2:

In a recent post, I asked: "What do you think is the single most important question about this blog?" Ricardo offered this answer: 

At some deep visceral core level, blogging (like most other creative endeavors) is about "actualization" (as Mazlow might say). Writers write because they can't not write. Painters paint because they can't not paint. Photographers photograph because they can't not photograph. Bloggers blog because they can't not blog. This is what they have to do in order to see the world through the right prism. This is how they learn the lessons they are meant to learn, find the answers they are meant to find, complete their mission in life that they are meant to complete. So the most important question here is not some surface issue, but the deeper issue of "Is this blog actualizing Althouse in the way that her heart and soul are crying out to be actualized?" 

That makes me think back to that old slogan about blogging "How your mind looks on the web." I wrote about that back here, just 10 days into the life of blogging. (I was really into being terse and enigmatic back then.)...

So the deeper issue is whether A.I. is actualizing Althouse in the way that her heart and soul are crying out to be actualized.

AND: After publishing the updated post, I clicked on the tag "Ricardo (the commenter)" and saw that there were 2 posts in addition to this one and the one from 2006 that I was just reminiscing about.

One was "At the Bowl of Oranges Café..." from 2009. Ricardo asked "How many oranges are in the bowl?" which led to a delightful guessing game and demonstration. 

The answer was astounding!

The other Ricardo-tagged post, from 2023, was titled with Ricardo's 2006 question: "Is this blog actualizing Althouse in the way that her heart and soul are crying out to be actualized?"

I found that this morning because in the context of writing the previous post — about Max Read's contention that the secret of blogging is logorrhea — I thought of the old slogan about blogging "How your mind looks on the web."...

That post has a drawing — I used to draw to listen... and to see what I thought: