Link: Bashing out words is easy, writing is rather more difficult

Alan Jacobs takes the time to look at one writer who thinks about how good it would be to write without writing, and a second who looks forward to a time when they can write about something without researching it. How do they imagine doing it? Using AI that mocks their writing or researching style.

Alan captures why this is likely to result in utterly flawed pieces:

As I was walking this morning I suddenly understood the most fundamental thing that’s wrong with the way Smith and Thompson think about these matters: Smith assumes that at the outset of a writing project he already knows what he wants to say and just has to get it said; Thompson assumes at the outset of a writing project that he understands what he needs to know and just has to find a way to know it. But for me writing isn’t anything like that.

I find this too, that in the process of writing, I often end up somewhere different than where I expected to arrive when I started out.