I had to unplug from AI to rediscover my love of writing

From ScienceMag:

When I recently opened up my word processor to start to compose a manuscript, I felt like I was learning to write again. I had to find the right words, the right style, the right voice. Every possible phrasing was crowding my mind, and the effort required to select and combine them made the task intimidating. I was frozen, overwhelmed. It had been more than a year since I had put in that kind of effort myself—because I had outsourced my writing to generative artificial intelligence (AI).

I had loved writing since I was a teenager. I grew up at the beginning of the internet, when blogs proliferated, and I spent most of my time after school writing posts on my own blog. My trivial stories about video games found a modest audience, but writing and being read brought me immense joy.

As an adult, I ended up as a radiologist—specializing in images, not words—but I still took pride in my writing style. Composing my first academic paper took dozens of hours, as I meticulously selected each word—then translated it, as I am not a native English speaker. I felt confident about the initial draft, but when I sent it to my supervisor he handed it back full of red notes, asking me to simplify, rephrase, reorganize. I realize now that he was helping me improve—but at the time, I felt frustrated I had not succeeded on my first try, and overwhelmed by the work of rewriting.

In the following months, however, I found a solution. I realized I could run my drafts through ChatGPT and any rough edges would instantly disappear. My writing process became much more efficient and my adviser was ecstatic about my progress. The red notes became rarer, and their content laudatory. Come 2025—the most successful year of my young career—and everyone was impressed by my scientific output. I could write the draft of a manuscript in hours, and reviewers commended the quality of my writing.

Except I did not author most of those texts. I came up with the idea, the experiments, the data, and the references. But the process was devoid of writing, and really, of me. Relying on AI felt like being in a tunnel, seeing nothing but the light of the flawless final submission at the end, oblivious about how I got there. I did not get to experience the pleasures of unraveling a thread of thought, encountering a challenge along the way, overcoming it with a creative twist, rephrasing, rereading, imagining the reader’s reaction. By the end of the year, I had a sense of vertigo: What if I could not write without assistance anymore?

I also began to realize AI was making me a less critical scientist. I would feed the chatbot my results and ask it to write the story I wanted to tell, and it would always oblige, never questioning my ideas. And although the papers it produced seemed good on the surface, once I started to actually read them in detail, I found they often said very little. I realized writing is a process that not only transforms ideas into text, but also allows the writer to continuously question and refine those ideas. The AI never did this.

So when I was invited to contribute an opinion piece for a journal a few months ago, I decided to close my internet browser and open my word processor again. I felt overwhelmed at first. But once I made peace with spending hours instead of minutes to generate a draft, muscle memory kicked in and I found myself having the best time of my academic life in more than a year. Once again, I experienced the bliss of finding the appropriate phrasing or the perfect figure of speech. I felt more engaged with my work, as I could retrace its authorship, from start to finish. And, to my great surprise, writing in my own voice brought an unexpected benefit: I felt proud of my pieces again. I showed them to my family and colleagues, and their reactions felt special. They were experiencing human emotions to human words.

When I showed my next manuscript to my supervisor, the red notes came back. But this time, I took them as a compliment. They were a marker of my own voice—and a reminder of the progress I could still make.

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