A few weeks ago at a Maven event, I told someone something that surprised him:

Although I write a lot about design with AI, ironically, I use AI at a minimum when it comes to writing.

The trade-off is real. It takes me much longer to write. But for the most part, I'm willing to bear it, for some reasons:

1. I see writing as a handcraft.

If you were making a clay pot, would you let AI do 90% of the work for you? If you were doing a watercolor painting, would you hand off 90% of it? For me, the answer is no. Writing a newsletter feels the same way. It's like a personal handcraft to me. I know it takes time, it's not perfect, there's a lot of back and forth. But that's exactly what makes it special.

2. Imperfection has its place.

AI has a tendency to chase perfection, and that constant pursuit of maximum efficiency and output is exactly what makes us feel tired and fatigued. Writing needs some imperfection, because it's a way to express ourselves, and self-expression doesn't really have a metric for efficiency and output. Sometimes the imperfect, genuine content is what resonates with people most.

3. AI doesn't really have empathy.

I wrote a note a while back about why I find AI-written tutorials hard to read. Yes, you can prompt AI to "write more like a human" or to be empathetic to readers or feed it more references. But AI still isn't human. There are many nuances in human emotion that are hard for AI to capture.

4. Writing helps us think.

If I outsource writing to AI, I lose the chance to reflect. It's like building muscles, if I always ask AI to do the job, I would slowly lose the muscle of thinking. And that's part of the essence of being human that I don't want to outsource.