“Writing is a form of thinking on the page” – Kathleen Stock

I’m not going to join the hand-wringing and despair about Gen-AI, but there’s an insightful column in The Times today from Kathleen Stock.

“Writing is a form of thinking on the page. As you write something down, then edit and rearrange it, you literally build a thought. When a machine spews out fully-formed paragraphs for the passive reader to repurpose and call his own, this crucial skill gets lost.”

It reminds me of Michael Gove’s watch-word, “Think in ink.”

If we are trying to communicate (rather than broadcast), especially on complex topics, there’s always merit in putting pen to paper, or fingers to keyboard, and working through the thought, the logic and the message . Otherwise, as Stock warns, we’ll be in a world where “there will still be lots of text but there won’t be much writing.”

Photo by Álvaro Serrano on Unsplash