Don’t use AI to create things until you can tell treasure from trash
Call it Claude’s paradox. The best writers write better with AI help. The rest write worse.
It’s not that mysterious, actually. If you give me some quality lumber, a power saw, a nail gun, and sandpaper and ask me to make a piece of furniture, I’ll produce something crappy, rickety, and ugly. I have no furniture-making skills. Power tools just allow me to make a crappy cabinet faster (and probably hurt myself in the process).
But put those same tools in the hands of a master cabinetmaker, and she’ll build something beautiful. For her, the better the tools, the faster and higher quality the result.
If you can’t tell the difference between witty, meaningful writing and crap, then when you use AI you’ll produce crap. You won’t know what’s wrong with it or how to fix it. If it’s in a corporate setting, the resulting “workslop” that you and your fellow AI users create will actually gum up the whole company.
Corporate users need writing help
In the last two weeks I heard from senior managers at two of the most successful companies in the world. Their stories were remarkably similar.
Both had teams that needed to produce strategy and product management documents intended to move the company forward. Both were frustrated. Their otherwise highly skilled workers were using AI to produce ineffective results. “Can you help us with a workshop on how to use AI effectively for writing?” they asked.
I said no — or at least, not quite. Their writers were not going to produce better writing with better AI training. Instead, they needed to understand how the best factual writing happens: how to plan, how to embrace brevity, how to front-load content, how to avoid toxic prose elements, and how to make documents that tell a logical and compelling story. These were the skills I wrote about it Writing Without Bullshit, and none of them have changed in the age of AI.
But once they mastered those principles, AI could help them out. So I proposed a workshop on effective writing, including AI tools. One client already agreed; I’ll be leading the workshop with them shortly.
How the best writers use AI
The most effective writers tell me that not only has AI helped them be more productive, it’s helped them create higher-quality content.
But almost none of them write with AI. They use AI to do research, summarize what they find, map out organization, suggest appropriate words, find flaws and inconsistencies, identify alternatives, and make things shorter.
One of the things many writers use AI tools for is brainstorming. They use AI to kick around ideas, test out possible strategies, find metaphors. Having a smart and knowledgeable friend available on-demand any time you’re thinking about how to write something is quite useful. But none of these writers let AI tell them what to do. They use it to figure out for themselves the best way to do their jobs.
What this means for how we teach writing
Banning AI from the writing classroom is a bad idea (and largely, impossible). Like spell-checkers, AI tools are an essential writing aid.
But only for writers who know what they’re doing in the first place.
We should stop teaching writing as if it is about putting words in the right order. And please, enough with the five-paragraph theme, a format designed to make every writer the same (and easy to grade). AI is great is writing five-paragraph themes because they’re a formulaic and sterile format.
No, teach writers something different.
Teach how to solve problems with writing. Pose a problem to students, then ask them, How would they solve it in writing?
How would they come up with an original idea? AI can help with that.
How would they organize it into a compelling story? AI can help with that.
How can they get past writer’s block and type something useful as a start? That they have to do themselves.
What’s less than ideal about what they wrote? How could it be better? AI can help with that. (So can their fellow students and their teacher.)
What does it feel like to create something excellent in writing? That’s an experience they can have, and faster, with the help of AI.
Teach them how writing solves problems. Teach them how to use AI as a helper, not a crutch or a thinking substitute.
Then they’ll learn the different between trash and treasure. Between slop and superb.
Corporate writers can learn this, too. But how powerful would it be if every student embraced this skill?