Got Writer's Block? Before Opening ChatGPT, Consider the Cost
Three under-acknowledged costs of outsourcing mental work to a machine—and what to do instead.
“No one confessed the Machine was out of hand. Year by year it was served with increased efficiency and decreased intelligence.”—E.M. Forster, The Machine Stops
We’ve all done it. Struggling to find the right words for a cover letter, newsletter, lesson plan, sales pitch, or whatever it might be, we turn to an AI chatbot like ChatGPT. In seconds, the machine churns out some “custom” content, and we breathe a sigh of relief. We can work with this. We spend a few minutes tweaking it to make it a touch more human and fire it off, thankful to have solved that particular problem in our day.
But did we really solve it? And at what cost?
I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately, which is why an article with the snappy title “Balancing the Risks and Rewards of AI” published by the Association of Governing Boards of Universities and Colleges (AGB) caught my eye.1 I began reading, and just a few words into it, my BS radar was already going off:
“During the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, Dan Frezza—then the vice president of strategic operations at William & Mary [my alma mater!]—considered how the “disconnected connectedness” of a remote-first world would affect fundraising…. As the lockdowns ebbed and life returned to ‘normal,’ Frezza kept encouraging his team—and fellow advancement leaders—to embrace creativity. How could they provide more meaningful experiences to donors? And how could they find efficiencies in their processes to make those experiences happen?” (emphases mine)
If there’s one thing I know about creativity, it’s that it doesn’t have much to do with efficiency. I’m no expert, but I’ve found that slowing wayyyy down can actually help unlock creativity. Nevertheless. Trying (and failing) to keep an open mind, I read on…
“Tools like ChatGPT can create first drafts of email and direct mail appeals, as well as requests for donor meetings and thank-you notes. They can help overcome writer’s block when fundraisers need to create subject lines for emails or names for events to catch the attention of alumni, donors, and friends.”
The essay goes on to cheerfully explain how with all the time saved by not having to do laborious tasks like creating subject lines for emails, fundraisers will have greater opportunity “to forge the interpersonal connections that can, in turn, inform their AI work.” (Raise your hand if you think ChatGPT wrote that last bit.) All of this started to make more sense when I connected the dots that AGB, the publisher of this article, receives significant funding from a firm called Fundmetric, “the world's first fundraising real-time analytics platform that uses artificial intelligence to understand, predict and serve donors.” But I digress.
As I contemplated the article, I realized my biggest issue with all of this isn’t even that people are increasingly using AI to overcome writer’s block. It’s that many of them are doing so without first pausing to consider what they might be sacrificing in the process. There seems to be a pervasive mindset of “if a technology makes us more efficient, it’s a net positive, period.” But I grow more and more skeptical of this viewpoint.
Off the top of my head, here are the three biggest costs of delegating intellectual work like written communication to AI.
Cost #1: Slower Brain
Using technology to solve the problem of writer’s block creates a vicious cycle. The more we surrender to writer’s block—because that’s what we’re doing when we can’t think of the right words ourselves so we get a machine to do it for us—the more frequently we will experience writer’s block. Consider this tweet:
This may seem like an extreme example, but, for me at least, it’s not a surprising one. When I used to spend hours on my phone every day watching Instagram reels, skimming news articles, and texting, it had the impact of destroying my concentration to the point that reading entire books—one of my favorite hobbies in the past—felt really hard.
In The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains (published in 2010), Nicholas Carr ponders what he perceives as his own weakened attention span since he became an avid web surfer:
“What the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. Whether I’m online or not, my mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.”
If surfing the web and watching Instagram reels—activities that seem almost quaint in the dawning era of AI—can compromise our attention span, what is chronic ChatGPT use going to do to our ability to write or even speak to one another in our own words? Are the “increased efficiencies” of using ChatGPT and similar programs really worth this cost? I think we must at least consider the question.
Further, if the reason so many of us are struggling to find the words for simple communications like an email subject line is because our “capacity for concentration” was already damaged by the internet and smartphones, does it follow that what we need now is more technology? In other words, is it wise to rely on technology (AI) to solve a problem that was created by over-reliance on technology in the first place?
Cost #2: Weakened Resilience
It’s not just our brains that get weaker when we routinely outsource the mental work we used to do ourselves—like writing our own emails—to machines; our resilience also takes a hit. Let’s return to the subject of writer’s block. I suffer from writer’s block a lot. In fact, I have already experienced it a few times since I sat down to write this post. But when I’m able to overcome it on my own, I get a fantastic feeling of competence. Then the next time it strikes, I remind myself that I’ve already overcome this silly thing a bunch of times in the past, and that gives me the confidence I need to work through it yet again.
This is how resilience works: 1) you encounter a challenge; 2) you face it head on and manage to overcome it; 3) you develop confidence in yourself; 4) you face a new challenge and use your confidence to knuckle through that one too. Rinse & repeat. By using ChatGPT to solve our writer’s block, we skip the incredibly critical step 2 of facing the challenge head on and overcoming it. Our resilience suffers as a result, making us that more doubtful of our own abilities and that much more tempted to turn to ChatGPT the next time we can’t think of an appropriate subject line for an email. Again, vicious cycle.
Cost #3: Everyone’s Privacy
After many glowing paragraphs about the rewards of using AI for fundraising, the “Balancing the Risks and Rewards of AI” article finally gets to the some of the risks. Notably, there’s no mention of slower brains and weakened resilience among people who rely on AI to draft their communications, but there is a discussion about privacy concerns:
“Public tools like ChatGPT and Notebook LM explicitly warn users that they will use any entered information to build their large language models (LLMs). What’s unclear is how and where those tools store the data that’s entered and whether the data will become public record.” (emphasis mine)
Comforting, right? Especially when you consider that people are now attending AI therapy sessions. But back to fundraising. In one of the article’s examples of the rewards of AI, fundraiser Dan Frezza talks about saving time by having AI write up his notes from a donor meeting:
“With the addition of AI to the process, Frezza says his notes come through much cleaner. Now, when he returns to his hotel each night, he’s editing his notes instead of rewriting them wholesale. ‘I’m spending 80 percent less time on this kind of work,’ he says. ‘With that extra time, maybe I can get six visits in a day when I travel—and that ends up being more visits overall in a year.’”
Doubtlessly, the efficiencies have increased. But I have questions. Did the donor from the meeting consent to the use of AI for this purpose? If so, were they fully aware what the AI company might do with that data—i.e., that it might become public record? The article doesn’t say.
Going back to the whole slower brain thing for a moment, I also know that writing up one’s own notes from a meeting, while time consuming, is good for memory purposes. When we outsource that work to AI, our brains are not forging the connections they would if we did it ourselves. Maybe that’s a fair price to pay for being able to squeeze an extra donor meeting into the day—I don’t know. But it disturbs me that this potential downside is not even addressed.
How to Overcome Writer’s Block the Old Fashioned Way
As Robert Frost said, “the best way out is always through.” If we turn to AI to solve writer’s block, we are not going through—we are going around (and potentially compromising our own and other people’s privacy in the process). But the good news is going through usually isn’t as bad as we expect.
In Cal Newport’s book Deep Work, he talks about the benefits of “meditative walks.” The idea is that you go on a walk and focus your mind on a specific challenge you’re having in your work, such as writer’s block. Somehow, some way, Cal assures us, solutions will miraculously present themselves. But there’s a catch: for this to work, you need complete and utter solitude. That means you need to be physically alone on your walk and you also can’t be consuming media. So leave your phone at home or if you can’t do that, turn it on silent and resist the urge to look at it. No listening to music either.
I was skeptical, but I decided to give it a try—and it WORKS. Here’s how the experience tends to go for me. In the first couple of minutes, I experience a mild panic that it’s not going to work, and I am tempted to think about other things—anything at all other than the writer’s block that prompted me to take the meditative walk in the first place. But—remember the whole resilience thing? I remind myself how previous meditative walks actually helped, and it calms me down enough to start thinking about my current problem, and within ten or 15 minutes, I’m usually making progress on the block.
Now, I know we don’t all have time for long walks every day; our name is not Henry David Thoreau and we do not live on Walden Pond. Fortunately, I have found that “meditative showers,” “meditative dish washing,” “meditative laundry folding,” and “meditative snow shoveling” can yield similar results. Sometimes, even simply “meditatively walking into a different room and staring at the wall for a few minutes” can unlock something. Though, again, none of these things will work if you don’t have solitude.
So the next time you have writer’s block (or any type of communication block), before turning to AI, why not give the old fashioned way a try? Your neurons will thank you.
Balancing the Risks and Rewards of AI by Kristin Hanson