In 1882, Friedrich Nietzsche bought a Malling-Hansen Writing Ball, the first commercially produced typewriter, hoping it would preserve his ability to write despite his failing eyesight. “Our writing utensils also help shape our thoughts,” he observed.
But the romance didn’t last. The machine quickened his sentences, yet dulled their edge, he complained. Nietzsche’s struggle was his own, but the lesson is universal: speed reshapes the relationship between thought and expression. The faster we move from idea to sentence, the less friction we encounter. And yet friction is what forces us to test, reshape, and strengthen our ideas. Without it, writing stops being thinking and becomes mere transcription.
The Age of Frictionless Writing
Today, that acceleration has no precedent. By my rough estimate, social media alone produces 500 billion words a day, before we add blogs, emails, captions, and the flood of AI-generated text.
The friction that gives depth is too often dismissed as inefficiency. Production has become the point. With generative AI, the distance between inspiration and output collapses still further, leaving little room for thought to breathe.
I see the effects in student papers. They contain polished yet vague sentences that buckle under scrutiny. Ask what they mean, and students often repeat the same phrase, as though repetition conjures clarity. This isn’t laziness. It’s what happens when tools outpace thought, shaping our language before we do.
Offloading the Work of Thought
Initial research seems to bear this out. An MIT Media Lab study found that when people use large language models to draft essays, they consistently underperform on measures of reasoning and comprehension (I do have some concerns about the study, especially due its small sample size). Scientists call this “cognitive offloading”: outsourcing mental effort to machines.
The danger isn’t that AI will replace writing. It’s that we’ll stop doing the kind of writing only humans can do. Machines can generate coherent sentences. What they cannot do is wrestle with language until it becomes precise, alive, and thought provoking.
In my recent conversation with Mark Blyth, a professor at Brown, he put it bluntly: AI makes “everyone the same shitty writer, corporate vanilla.” By smoothing sentences, it flattens voice and erases the friction that turns writing into thought.
From Words to Noise
Jacques Attali, writing on the political economy of music, warned that mass production and ease had turned sound into background noise. What once demanded attention dissolved into a constant hum. Words risk the same fate.
When I spoke with Oxford professor and Guardian columnist Timothy Garton Ash, he warned, “we risk losing the art of conversation.” SIAS Bologna professor and Guardian columnist Nathalie Tocci added: “The essence of writing is that it shakes people.” That shake depends on friction. And friction, in the age of instant output, is being worn away.
For Cambridge professor Helen Thompson, the crisis of language is already here: “Most students don’t have a real relationship with language. They’re not wrestling with it. And if you’re not doing that, the pursuit of truth falls away.”
The Human Advantage
FT columnist Simon Kuper sees the same erosion playing out in public life. “Most journalists and politicians have no memory,” he told me. “Everything seems like it’s happening for the first time.” That loss of continuity isn’t trivial.
George Steiner saw language as the storehouse of memory. When it decays, he warned, so does our capacity to think. James Baldwin put it even more urgently: “People evolve a language in order to describe and thus control their circumstances, or in order not to be submerged by a reality that they cannot articulate.” Lose that, and we become spectators to our own experience.
The advantage in an AI age lies in presence, the quality of attention we, humans, bring to the page. That means noticing when a sentence merely fills space, and when it actually carries thought. AI can mimic style, but not the lived weight of words.
Consider Joan Didion’s seven-word declaration: “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” Or Stefan Zweig’s recollection of a vanished world: “an ordered world with calm transitions [where] time and age had another measure.” Or Primo Levi’s searing memory of Auschwitz: “I am constantly amazed by man's inhumanity to man.” These sentences bend time, memory, and judgment. They are steeped in memory and lived experience, in ways no machine can ever be.
A Rough Guide to Writing in the AI Age
What follows is no match for such sentences, but a modest attempt to reflect on how to stick to the human act of writing in an age of machines. Here is my rough guide to writing in a time of generative AI:
Keep friction in the process: Slow down so your thoughts can catch up with your words.
Use AI as a collaborator, not a crutch: Let tools suggest, never decide.
Interrogate your claims: Make sure every sentence could withstand a reader’s “why?” or “how?”, especially in academic work.
Edit like you mean it: Machines produce sentences, but only you choose which deserve to stay.
Guard your memory: Anchor your words in history, evidence or lived experience.
Write to stir, not to scroll: Push readers toward insight, not mere consumption.
Nietzsche understood these rules. The Writing Ball couldn’t sharpen his sentences, only he could. The same holds true now. With every word, we choose the depth and contour of what we can think.
The work of making sense of the human condition and our shared world, in all its contradictions, complexities, and surprises, isn’t something a machine can do for us. Whether it clacks in a 19th-century typewriter or hums in a 21st-century server farm, the page is still ours to claim.
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I have to say I am baffled by your advice. Having established what a destructive, anti-creative development AI is, you recommend that writers use it. No thanks!