I use AI for writing all the time. But not because it’s good at writing.

In fact, just the opposite is true. AI is so reliably bad at writing that I’ve actually taken advantage of that, and made its bad writing an integral part of my writing process.

I’ve written a lot of books and articles over the years, and while I used to start with an outline, I don’t anymore. These days I do a lot of brain dumping and brainstorming and talking out loud to an AI, working out what I think about something. I accumulate a lot of notes and ideas, and run a lot of experiments, and at some point, if I’m lucky, I decide there might be an article somewhere in all of that.

Then I ask the AI to take everything I’ve given it and write a draft.

And that AI-generated draft is universally terrible.…