Writing and Thinking in the Age of AI

As a high school student in 2025, I have realised how scarce the skill of writing will become in the upcoming years.

I'm not saying this as if I were merely an outside observer, since I myself have become worse at being articulate after using AI on a daily basis, part of the reason why I started writing these essays. I'm definitely not advocating for not using AI, since it would be stupid to think like that for a variety of reasons. All I'm doing is merely expressing that which I became aware of in the past couple of months… There's need for a balance here, at least if you don't want to give up your ability to write.

Writing is one of the best ways to develop thinking, and considering that we're using most AI models not just to write random stuff, but to think through complex tasks in a more "efficient" way via text, by extension it's not that we'll lose the skill of writing that worries me, but losing the ability to think.

Thinking is hard. I believe most of us don't like to think, and few of us actually do it regularly. In a world that's ever changing, you can't stop and think about everything, you have to carefully choose that which is worth thinking about. As a solution for this, so as to not be left behind, we inform ourselves from others about what's happening out there. The printing press, radio and television made information more accessible, therefore we've become more informed as a whole, but that doesn't mean we've become better thinkers.

Most people don't bother with thinking, they just want to be told what to believe… The reason you might choose to read a book over a blog post on any given topic is the depth which the author offers in his writing. By reading a book, you start to understand why the author thinks the way he does, which in return makes it easier for you to create counterpoints and disapprove of the ideas presented. On the other hand, in a blog post, you don't have any of the depth, everything is surface level, it's just a set of ideas. You might agree or disagree with what's being said, but you can't go through the thought process of the blogger. More than anything, people don't even want to go that deep as reading an article, they would rather just read the title. The issue is that we've optimised for information memorisation rather than actual thinking.

Remember the school essays? That's the kind of writing that inhibits thinking; you should know everything you're gonna say before you start your introduction. There's a clear structure; an argument A, an argument B, a conclusion, etc. But that's not how thinking works. When you think, you don't know where you'll end up, that's why we think in the first place; to find new answers, to explore.

In order to be a clear thinker you do need to possess a lot of information, but information alone is useless… You must understand how to connect the dots. Besides, the information I refer to is based on "observations", rather than well-rounded thoughtful ideas that are already fully formed and hard to decompose into basic components.

As I'm writing this, I realise that maybe most of us were just under the impression that we "think"... I mean, at the end, none of our thoughts are really original, we're like AI models that generalise based on all the data they receive... It's just that some of us use only RAG, and forget the part of generating something...