Why ChatGPT will destroy your brain

The worst thing about AI writing technologies is that they deny us the chance to reflect and grow.

‘How do I know what I think until I see what I say?’
E.M. Forster

Writing is thinking. As we write, our thoughts and words shape each other as they move forward hand in hand. But if we click straight to the end of the writing process, we deny ourselves the opportunity to think along the way. As a result, the destination we arrive at might not be the one we really needed to reach.

The format of the ChatGPT prompt presupposes that you know exactly what you want before you begin writing. But sometimes, the path through the forest only becomes clear once you begin to walk it. Digging into words unearths emergent insights: unanticipated ideas and perceptions that you couldn’t have known at the outset but now stand revealed as vital to your text.

As E.M. Forster’s quote suggests, you may find that your ideas only become clear to you while you write, as you weigh up what you want to say and see it staring back at you from the page. Sometimes, it’s like having an internal debate: you set out your ideas in words, only to realise with a frown that you don’t actually agree with yourself. So if you don’t think that, what do you think?

If you write fiction, the drafting process lets you hear your story as you tell it. Characters reveal to you who they are, how they want to be and what they want to do. New situations and events occur to you as new causalities and consequences emerge. Plot points you thought were intractable are resolved. Playing the part of your reader, you imagine how your story will unfold in their mind, moving ever closer to the perfect blend of what you want to write and what they want to read.

Writing is a doorway to learning. Writing about a new subject is an excellent way to dive in and start gathering knowledge – or, if you already know the subject, to deepen and clarify your thinking about it. When you’re idly thinking about something, you can gloss over a few gaps and fuzzy bits here and there. But when you sit down to write, you no longer have anywhere to hide. Every point must be put down in black and white, and that discipline forces you to get everything properly straight in your mind.

Albert Einstein supposedly said, ‘If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough.’ This could mean that you need to improve your understanding of the idea until you can explain it in simple terms. Yet the converse is also true: if you work on explaining the idea simply, your own understanding of it will improve.

Writing is a journey from not knowing to knowing. Most obviously, we don’t know at the outset what the words of our finished text will be. Beyond that, we may not be sure about its length, structure or tone. There might be things we need to research or people we need to consult. We may have a strong opening or an intriguing starting point, but less sense of where we want to end up. And we may not even know quite what our writing is going to be about.

Whatever the reasons, there are many things we don’t know, and that gives us a sense of not-knowing. Sometimes that’s exciting. But at other times we may feel not-knowing as an anxiety or a lack. We may wonder whether we can finish, or even start. We may ask ourselves whether we have the ability to surmount the obstacles in our way. And the more we struggle with the writing process, the worse this pain becomes.

However, we have to deal with this pain and get through it, because the moment of not-knowing is also the creative moment. It’s the sandbox where we play around and try things out. It’s the overgrown path that we plunge into just to see where it leads. It’s the ‘what if?’ that allows curiosity to override rationality. It’s the freedom to let go of the pressure to produce and disregard the demands of the reader – just for now.

Crucially, not-knowing gives you the right to make mistakes. A mistake is an outcome that seems unwanted right now but might later turn out to be ideal. Or it might be a message from your unconscious about something you need to be mindful of. As Brian Eno says, ‘Honour thy mistake as a hidden intention.’

Sometimes, we just have to trust our writing process, knowing that a solution will come in time. If we can just stay with the state of not-knowing for long enough, and lean into it instead of fearing it, it often reveals an answer that was there all along, but hidden from us because we’d convinced ourselves that it didn’t exist.

‘Become at ease with the state of “not knowing.” This takes you beyond mind because the mind is always trying to conclude and interpret. It is afraid of not knowing. So, when you can be at ease with not knowing, you have already gone beyond the mind. A deeper knowing that is non-conceptual then arises out of that state.’
Eckhart Tolle

ChatGPT is a certainty machine. By leaping in to ‘conclude and interpret’ on our behalf, it eases the pain of not-knowing, allowing us to jump from aim to output without any of the uncomfortable not-knowing in between. But uncertainty is something that we have to feel on the way to creating something real and true. By taking away uncertainty and transporting us direct to our destination, ChatGPT robs us of the crucial opportunity – and necessity – to use our brains.