I’m Begging You — Never Write With A.I.

Key claims

• It’s a plea, and it’s total. Don’t use A.I. for school papers, work briefs, letters, speeches or even perfunctory emails. Don’t let it organize notes, suggest an opener, a segue or a close, or write a first draft you then edit. Editing a machine draft does not make it yours.
• Not because it’s unethical. Undisclosed A.I. writing is deception, but disclosure mostly fixes that. And not because you’ll out-write the machine: soon, if not already, you won’t, the way you can’t outrun a car or beat a chess engine.
• The real cost is enfeeblement. Writing with A.I. is an escalator when what you need is the daily habit of taking the stairs. It is accelerating the decline of writing on top of the documented decline of reading (Rose Horowitch’s “postliterate age” in The Atlantic).
• Writing compels thought. It forces ideas through articulation, grammar, intelligibility, coherence and the inspection of others, which makes people clear, logical, accurate and accountable. A word said in anger is forgiven more easily than one written, because writing signals it was considered.
• Machine words go hollow. His example: a father of the bride using A.I. for the toast. What it adds in eloquence it subtracts in effort and authenticity, and the daughter would be right to feel let down.
• Routine writing is the gym. The muscle used for memos is the same one used for writing that matters; mundane writing is the practice that makes better writers, thinkers and more creative people.
• Evidence it’s already happening: an A.I.-detection review of 100 doctoral dissertations found 56% had “more than negligible” A.I. text and 19% were more than half A.I.-generated.
• The stakes are civic. Broad literacy and democracy rose together; people who can read and write for themselves advocate for themselves. He ties the reverse direction to Trump-era social media, and closes by urging readers to type their own replies as a small act of free will and resistance against “an ever-dumber world.”

Notable quotes

What, uniquely, does writing do? It compels thought.

Bret Stephens · The New York Times · August 4, 2026

Reader reactions (top comments, summarized)

• A reader who has “written millions of words with AI” says Stephens is right: the value was never the output but the thinking accumulated on the way to it, so they stopped using it to write.
• A dissent: a reader building a fan “writer’s room” for a cancelled show says the A.I. acted as a writing coach and made them work harder, not less.
• A high-school math teacher ran the principal’s welcome-back email through the school’s detector (100% A.I.) and planned to discuss the column with students on day one.

Connections

• Writing as Thinking · Writing · AI and Work
• The corporate mirror image: PwC Critical Thinking & Judgment Certificate, which manufactures the “reps” A.I. now takes away.