13 Beliefs About AI Writing

Writers in our How We Write Now series have drawn very different lines around AI. Some use it for research and editing but won’t let it write a sentence. Mike Taylor will. He uses models to draft almost everything he publishes. His test is whether he could defend the ideas if a reader showed up to argue.

Mike shares the 13 beliefs behind that. He puts more of his own material into the prompt than he asks the model to write. He keeps social posts entirely his own. Some of this cuts against how most of the series’ writers work, which is what makes it worth reading.—Kate Lee

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I just finished my second book with publisher O’Reilly, who doesn’t allow using AI to write, and it’s the last thing I’ll agree to write manually. Writing the traditional way feels like using a typewriter when I have a word processor, and the output isn’t any better than what I write with AI.

I’ve been experimenting with AI writing since GPT-3 came out in 2020, when Copy.ai was giving out free accounts to everyone who failed to get into Y Combinator. When GPT-4 came out in 2023, I developed a writing process that passed the Turing test: friends and colleagues couldn’t tell it wasn’t me, and that was depressing enough that I stopped writing.