Why Write When AI Can Do It for You?

​I’ll admit it… writing has never been my favorite activity. But as someone who’s spent most of their life as a student, I’ve had to do a lot of it. I’ll never forget the first draft I wrote for a scientific publication. When I got it back, it was so covered in red ink that I wondered if my mentor had to buy a new pen. His main feedback was that “We don’t write like this in Science.” That was before I learned how to follow the proper patterns.
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Writing in English added another layer of difficulty. One professor once told me, “Some non-native speakers write as if they were born to the language.” Sadly, I wasn’t one of them. I often needed help and even paid for proofreading and editing services, but even then it always felt like I couldn’t fully express myself.

Then came the large language models (LLMs). I began working with GPT before it went mainstream, and I quickly fell in love with it. Back when it was still GPT-2, it felt like the model and I were struggling side by side. Its writing was clumsy and scattered, sentences often began with one idea and ended somewhere completely different. But I found something delightful in its unpredictability. I spent hours talking with it, captivated by its creative sparks and incoherent stream of consciousness.

Then everything changed. The model got better. Much better! I found myself feeling both amazed and unsettled. How has it improved so quickly? Why couldn’t I keep up? That frustration eventually pushed me to explore ways to integrate GPT into my own life and embody it. I developed GPT-ME, a wearable system that allowed GPT to whisper words into my ear during all my social interactions. For months, I spoke GPT’s words instead of coming up with them myself. That experiment was highly transformative and I continue performing it, thinking and writing about it.

As someone who has willingly landed her voice to a machine, I often find myself asking: what’s the point of writing, now that AI can do it for me? If GPT can generate sentences faster, more clearly, and often more eloquently than I can, then why bother? Why struggle with grammar, flow, or the constraints of a second language when a model can produce polished text in seconds?
Framing the question this way reflects a common mindset, one that sees AI as something designed to outperform humans and eventually replace us. It turns our relationship with AI into a zero-sum game, a competition over labor, intelligence, and decision-making. In the process, we begin to relinquish the very practices that shape our identities and define our humanity.
But this competitive framing isn’t inherent to the technology itself. It is rather a product of the cultural, political, and economic systems through which AI is developed and understood.

There are other ways for us to imagine our lives alongside AI technology.
What if, instead of treating AI as a replacement, we saw it as a companion? Or a collaborator? What if writing with AI wasn’t a form of surrender, but an invitation to think differently, to stretch the boundaries of authorship, voice, and self?
When I write with GPT, I’m not trying to compete. I’m trying to engage. There is a back-and-forth in which I write something and give it to GPT. Sometimes I ask GPT to rewrite what I’ve written, making it clearer and more coherent. Other times, I ask it to respond directly to my thoughts. Sometimes I let it complete my sentences. Sometimes it surprises me, and I follow its lead. Other times, I reject its suggestions and start again. This interaction is not just about getting this piece of text done. Instead, it becomes an intimate relationship between GPT and me. A correspondence that reveals how language emerges between us, shaped by context, intention, and negotiation.
Writing in this hybrid mode makes me more aware of the choices I make. It slows me down. It reminds me that more than anything, language is a space of encounter. Between me and the machine. Between me and my readers. Between who I am and who I might become.
So I write, not in spite of AI, but with it. It is not about proving that I can. Not even primarily so others can read what I produce. I write to cultivate relationships, to explore what becomes possible when authorship is shared, distributed, and unstable.

Come to think about it, wasn’t it always like that?

Writing has never been a purely solitary act. My words carry the echoes of every book I’ve read, every conversation I’ve had, every teacher who corrected my drafts. Even when I thought I was writing alone, I was in dialogue with ideas, with conventions, with the words of others. The self, after all, is never entirely separate. It is shaped through relations, through language, through time.

Maybe the real shift we’re experiencing isn’t just about letting AI write with or for us. Maybe the deeper transformation lies in having AI as our reader. GPT becomes an entity that reads my words and responds, evaluates, and reflects. Beyond that, it is also being trained on what I write.

Might this be the reason to write these days?