Handing over your writing to AI is a terrible idea. It’s also an act of self-deception. An AI doesn’t help you say what you mean. It speaks for you—not your idea but its own.

Joan Didion famously said, “I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking.” Scores of other writers from Stephen King to Flannery O’Connor and more have said the same. It’s a vital point.

There’s no such thing as an idea separate from the words in which it’s expressed. Before it’s articulated in words, it’s a feeling, an intention, a glimmer—the precursor of an idea but not an idea as such. The writing or speaking of it is the very creation of it.

I saw this every day when I taught writing and public speaking for 16 years. A student would say, “I know what I want to say, but I don’t know how to say it.” In fact, they didn’t know what they wanted to say. They needed to learn how to say it, how to put it in words, in order to understand what they were actually seeing, feeling, intending.

Writing is an act of self-clarification and even self-revelation. It’s a revelation of yourself to yourself by yourself. Its value is at least as much for you as for your readers.

To the extent that you let AI do the actual writing, you’re not the actual author. The tech is. And you’ve just handed over—ceded, surrendered, given up—its talismanic power for your life to a machine.

(In the case of using AI to help translate something from one language to another, something you already wrote, there is of course a difference.)