Don’t Outsource Your Thinking
The productivity gain is real. So is the thing you're quietly giving up to get it.
You can usually tell when an email has been written by someone who wasn’t actually there when they wrote it, and the giveaway isn’t anything as obvious as a clunky phrase or a misplaced bit of jargon, it’s a quality of flatness, a hotel-pillow plumpness, the sense that all the right words have been arranged in all the expected places by someone whose attention was politely elsewhere. You’ve probably had three of them this week. You may have sent one.
I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately because I’ve just spent a year writing a book about an industry that’s currently losing its grip on the distinction between using a tool and being used by one, and the more I look at it the more I see the same pattern bleeding into everything else. Designers being asked to clean up whatever the model spat out. Lawyers filing briefs whose footnotes cite cases that never happened, an embarrassment that’s occurred often enough now to qualify as a genuine professional sub-genre. Copywriters generating “first drafts” that are also, somehow, the final drafts. Teachers marking essays using the same systems their students used to write them, in a sort of joyless closed loop nobody quite signed up for. The work that used to be the work has quietly become an overhead to be optimised away, and a lot of the people doing the optimising have started to feel the small private wince that arrives when you hit send on something you didn’t really write.
So let me say the thing this piece is here to say, and then we can wander around it for a bit.
Don’t outsource your thinking to Ai. Use Ai to help execute the thinking you’ve already done.
The thinking is the job. Whatever your job is, the thinking is the job. If you’re a designer the thinking is the day and a half you spend staring at the brief working out what it’s actually asking for, which is almost never what it says. If you’re a copywriter the thinking is the part where you figure out who you’re talking to and what they’re frightened of, before a single word goes near a page. If you’re a lawyer it’s reading the case carefully enough to spot the angle the other side hasn’t. If you’re a teacher it’s clocking which kid has gone quiet this week and working out why. The output is the residue of the thinking, and the thinking is the thing the salary’s actually for, even when the job description pretends otherwise.
When you outsource the thinking, you haven’t saved time, you’ve outsourced the job. The output looks fine, often it looks better than fine, because these tools are genuinely brilliant at producing things that look fine, but you’ve quietly removed yourself from the loop you were hired to occupy, and there are several very rich men in California whose entire business model depends on you not noticing for as long as possible.
I should say at this point that I’m not writing this by candlelight with a quill and a sense of moral grievance. I use these tools. I’m writing this on a laptop that has, somewhere in its memory, more Ai assistance than I’d particularly care to itemise on a tax return. The tools are useful in roughly the way a calculator is useful, which is to say they handle the bit you’ve already worked out and they spare you the arithmetic, and that’s a real and lovely thing. The trouble only starts when you stop being the person who works it out.
There’s a tell, if you want to start catching this in yourself. Ask whether you knew what you wanted to say before the machine helped you say it, or whether the machine told you what you thought. The first is using the tool. The second is the tool using you, and somewhere in a server farm a meter is ticking up while a model gets very slightly better at impersonating the version of you who used to do this work properly.
The book I’ve finished is called Drawn to Extinction. On the surface it’s about the comics industry, which is currently being asked to accept that the labour of generations of artists, writers, letterers, colourists and editors can be hoovered into training data and resold back to the public as a slightly cheaper, slightly faster and considerably hollower version of itself, and which features long conversations with people like Pat Mills, John Wagner, Hannah Berry, Frazer Irving and Ram V, whose voices are the actual heart of the thing. But the book isn’t really just about comics, it’s about what extraction looks like when you can watch it happening close enough to map, in a culture small enough to hold in your head. Comics is the canary, and whatever you do for a living is the mine.
The reasonably good news, and there is some, is that the distinction at the top of this piece is genuinely available to you without any dramatic life rearrangement. You don’t have to throw your laptop in a canal or write a manifesto or grow your hair out. You just have to keep the thinking on your side of the desk and let the machine do the bit that comes afterwards. Decide what the email needs to say before you ask the tool to tidy the sentences. Decide what the design needs to do before you ask the tool to generate variations of something you haven’t yet figured out. Decide what you actually believe, and then, only then, let the machine help you put it on the page. It’s simple in the way that going for a run is simple, which is to say not at all, because the temptation to skip the first step is enormous and the short-term cost of skipping it is essentially invisible. The long-term cost is that you slowly stop being someone who can do the first step at all, and nobody is pricing that in yet.
I’ll be writing more of these over the coming weeks, pulling from the book and from the conversations that shaped it. If any of this lands, stick around. If you want the long version, with all the names and the studios and the people who taught me why any of this matters, the book is below, and I’d be grateful if you ordered it, read it, posted your little review or any thoughts online, and then passed it on.
In the meantime.
Don’t outsource your thinking to Ai.
Use Ai to help execute the thinking you’ve already done.