on writing to think

i’ve never really liked writing.

looking back, journaling was one of my least favorite assignments in elementary school. so when ai came along, one of the biggest benefits for me was obvious: i no longer had to write long pieces on my own.

at least, that was what i thought.

the problem is that ai writing has a smell.

if you skim it quickly, it often sounds smooth and well written. but once you slow down and look at how the sentences connect, something begins to feel off. the logic does not always hold together. and when you look closely at the individual words, the awkwardness becomes even harder to ignore.

i used to think this would disappear as the models improved. but even with fable 5, the most expensive model ever released, i still feel disappointed by its sense of context and its word choices. the gap between ai writing and the writing i actually want has not closed as much as i expected.

because of that, i have been trying to write more on my own.

emails, journal entries, short notes. anything, really.

to cover the smell of ai writing, i need to spray some of my own smell over it. but ai has reduced the number of occasions when i need to write, and that makes me worry that my own smell might slowly fade away. so lately, i have been making a deliberate effort to keep writing.

and through that process, i have realized something unexpected.

i used to think writing was mainly about connecting ideas that already existed in my head. in my mind, knowledge was made up of nodes, and writing was the work of creating edges between them. writing gave context to things i already knew.

but writing does more than create edges. it creates new nodes too.

sometimes, while writing, i find myself having thoughts i have never had before. these are not forgotten ideas returning to me. they are genuinely new ideas, new expressions, and new ways of seeing something.

it feels as if i start writing with one hundred nodes in my head and finish with one hundred and five.

the more often this happens, the more seriously i take the act of writing.

i started writing again because i wanted a deodorizer made from my own smell, something that could cover up the smell of ai. but it turns out that writing gives me much more than that.

if ai is going to remain part of my life forever, then journaling probably needs to remain part of it too.

fortunately, writing has not been as difficult as i once believed. and even more fortunately, it has turned out to be rewarding.