Introduction

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In earlier times, many great ideas were presented in words. People used words to express their thought processes or resulting ideas.

With the development of generative AI, writing is no longer exclusively a human ability. Generative AI can produce text with high speed.

This brings two advantages. Generative AI eliminates two challenges that people faced in earlier times: using foreign languages and turning rough thoughts into words.

So this raises two important questions:

1. Why should we still write when AI can generate text for us?
2. Why should we still learn to write in English when AI can translate or write in English for us?

Background

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How would you answer these questions? Before sharing my answer, I think we first need to clarify what writing and what English is.

What writing is

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Writing is the act of using language to express and preserve our thoughts. During my studies, my mentor, Tate Tian, often told me that writing is thinking in slow motion. Expressing an idea clearly is difficult. The world is complex, and explaining a question or phenomenon in simple terms is even harder.

Generative AI does not always solve this problem. When I use it, I often find that it overexplains simple ideas and makes them sound more complicated than they need to be. This may be partly due to the way AI models are trained and optimized. They can produce detailed answers, but they do not always know which details are necessary. They may also struggle with unfamiliar situations.

What English is

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English is one of many natural languages. Writing can take different forms: we can write in code, use formal languages, or write in a natural language such as English.

Chinese is often more compact than English. In some cases, the same idea can be expressed in fewer words in Chinese. However, English may guide us to organize and understand ideas differently.

As Wittgenstein said, “The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.” Using different languages can help us practice different ways of thinking.

Generative AI can lower the cost of learning a language, but it cannot replace the different ways of thinking that come with using that language.

Motivation

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Although generative AI is convenient, there are still many things it cannot do because of how it works. Therefore, as a Chinese speaker, using a different language is a way to train myself to think in different ways.

Conclusion

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In my opinion, AI can help us work more efficiently and make it easier to produce content or other deliverables. However, the real challenge is still thinking. AI cannot replace human judgment; it can analyze information and generate answers, but people still need to decide what questions to ask and whether the answers make sense. So, critical and systems thinking is becoming more important than ever. So, we should practice writing in English to express our ideas clearly and develop different ways of thinking. This can help us remain valuable in a world where AI is becoming more capable.