The dangers of autocomplete
the most essential aspects of writing: grappling with uncertainty, confusion and insecurity, and allowing time and space to consolidate ideas and form new associations.
As appealing as the prospect of an automated writing assistant may seem, far better would be a writing coach that resists the impulse to spoon-feed us ‘the answer’. A coach prompts us to pause, reflect, reconsider, revise. Lex is a far cry from the ‘thought partner’ it claims to be. It more closely resembles Gmail’s Smart Compose: someone always ready to interject with sensible, middle-of-the-road suggestions, foreclosing possibilities before we have even had a chance to consider them.
We create AI — and automation — to do hard things for us instead of help us do hard things.
If we want to make sense of what we are writing, and why, we can dispense with pseudo-oracles imposing their ideas on us. We have to think for ourselves which, by extension, means writing for ourselves.