"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.

"Is this blog actualizing Althouse in the way that her heart and soul are crying out to be actualized?"

Asked Ricardo, in the comments to a December 15, 2006 post of mine that asked, "What do you think is the single most important question about this blog?" — quoted in a December 16, 2006 post of mine, "How your mind looks on the web, part 2."

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."  

I had thought the single most important question about this blog was "If Althouse is a liberal -- as she claims -- then why is she almost always picking on liberals and almost never on conservatives?" That's very interesting to me now, 17 years later, because it's still a live question. 

But Ricardo, the commenter, said:

At the Bowl of Oranges Café...

... you can have milk and toast and honey.

IN THE COMMENTS: Ricardo asks: How many oranges are in the bowl? See if you can guess.

AND: The answer, after so many low guesses and finally mainly by flailing, was arrived at by t-man. I demonstrate the surprising capacity of the bowl here:

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.) Why am I making a post out of Ricardo's comment? For one thing, it struck me to read the word "soul" right after doing the previous post with the quote from the conference.... But I need to dash off and relocate myself... so I'll finish this post in a few minutes. How my mind/soul/heart look on the web will have to be subordinated -- for the moment -- to where my body is situated on the face of the Earth. 

ADDED: I seem to have stumbled into a "conservative soul" theme that makes it seems as though I ought to read Andrew Sullivan's book. Too bad he annoyed me so much the other week! (The soul of Althouse is riddled with spite and pique! Is that liberal or conservative... or somehow ineffably centrist?)

MORE: Hey, whatever happened to I'll finish this post in a few minutes? Sorry, I had to relocate to my office to do office hours and students actually came to them. I wasn't expecting that! So, anyway, where was I going with this, before the nonvirtual world grabbed hold of me?

Let's see... Is this blog actualizing Althouse? Hmmm.... The opposite of "actualizing" might be virtualizing. This blog has definitely done something to me. I'm afraid it has completely restructured my brain!

Whether that's the real me or not... is just more material for another blog post.