AI makes brainpower optional

Doing great work requires friction, not automation.

It wasn’t long ago that writing a blog was too time-consuming for most people to commit to.

You had to love it for the sake of the work to gain any momentum and build an audience. That’s something I’ve leaned into for nearly a decade.

But AI tools like ChatGPT have changed the calculus. The floodgates will never close again — people can now create content without discipline, skill or effort. What once took years can be replicated in seconds.

I’ve had several recent conversations with individuals who want to publish content on the internet. They want to “build a brand” or go viral, not master a craft.

Who am I to judge? More power to them. They’re responding to the fact that barriers to generating interesting and compelling work have flattened to zero.

Still, it bothers me that they want the noun without the verb.

It’s nothing new for people to chase upside without sacrifice, but AI makes it possible in a way that entirely rewires incentives.

It took me eight years of publishing once or twice a week to build a library of nearly 400 blog posts. That discipline not only made me a clearer thinker and writer, but also a better person.

ChatGPT can generate 100 times that output in two minutes. And it probably wouldn’t be half bad.

Even if my work today is better than AI’s, the pace of technological progress suggests that won’t be true for long. The world’s biggest companies are spending hundreds of billions to ensure it.

To be clear, I use ChatGPT every day. It helps me work faster and smarter. But I’m glad I had a lot of practice thinking and writing without AI.

Sure, kids going through school with AI at their fingertips will have certain advantages. But they will have to fight hard to graduate with any capacity to generate novel ideas of their own.

Writing is simply thinking, made concrete. If you commoditize writing, you cheapen thinking itself.

If thinking becomes an afterthought in the age of automation, what does that mean for originality?

The best writers — novelists, journalists, essayists, bloggers — spend years wrestling with language and slogging through imprecise drafts. That friction isn’t a nuisance; it’s the point. Writing is supposed to be hard.

Clarity of thought is directly related to how much pain you can endure on paper. If we outsource that struggle to AI, we end up with more polished sentences at the cost of duller minds.

The best possible outcome is for AI to serve as an accelerant. This is already the case for many smart professionals I know. Technology should augment — rather than bypass — effort.

The more insidious risk is when AI becomes an intellectual crutch. The easier it is to produce passable work, the harder it becomes to justify struggling toward excellence.

Convenience, more than anything, has a way of undermining even the best intentions.

In writing, like other crafts, the path of least resistance leads nowhere worth visiting.

Again, I’m all for innovation and efficiency. I’m not like the candlemakers who protested the lightbulb. Cautionary tales don’t stem from technologies that render old tools obsolete. They come from ones that mute our capacity to strive against our own limitations.

Now, I don’t think AI will kill creativity.

But if we trade effort for automation, we won’t need it to kill anything — we’ll surrender it without a fight.

Have a great weekend,

Phil Rosen
Co-founder & Editor-in-Chief, Opening Bell Daily