Existing literature as writing deterrent, and AI

I’ve been putting off writing a blog post that seems very important to me, because it seems important, and so should be done on a later day when I am a better person, and able to do it justice. Also, once I have written one or two other posts that should precede it. Which also I’m not up to today. Noticing the uneasy wrongness of all that, I set out to write the blog post anyway, badly, today.

But less than a sentence in, I remembered that I heard that maybe someone else had written something like this. And one ought not write what someone else has written, it seemed, at least without framing it like that: ‘I am summarizing this argument by Alice’.

In the past, I might have unproductively Googled a bit for it, then gone on to write my blog post. But now I thought: perhaps AI could tell me? So I asked. Yes, it said, that has been thoroughly written about, and gave me some papers. In the blogosphere? Yes, and it gave me some blog posts.

In the process of this discussion, I learned that others’ stances on it seem importantly wrong to me, and so there are still natural things to say to help the public conversation get to a correct view. But now the natural thing to do is to read these other pieces, and reference them, and post as a correction in a conversation with them. And that is less punchy and reaches a different audience. And overall, I think will just be worse. A post that states a complete view with no regard for what has been said before or how it relates to them would I think be a better artifact here.

So why not just write that anyway? I suppose because it seems strange to not acknowledge an existing conversation, and ignorant and silly to write about a topic that others are discussing without bothering to learn what they are saying at all. It’s embarrassing to say something everyone’s been talking about for a while as if it is new. So it is tempting to at least learn enough about the state of conversation that I can mention it here and there, even if trying to keep the overall discussion accessible to those not deep in the debate.

But learning about the conversation is time consuming, so the post goes back to the pile of really important ones I don’t have time to do justice to right now. And what would be added—references to existing discussion, coherence with that literature, a check on my arrogance—probably doesn’t add much for most readers.

So overall this seems perhaps an unfortunate development. And not deeply the fault of AI, to be clear—if it would be better for me to just write the post without reference to the literature, then the deeper problem is probably the norms and sensibilities that push me against that. But given those deeper problems, help from AI is a hindrance: AI makes it easier to find out about literature, which brings more topics into the realm where I feel obliged to read literature before writing about the topic. And if everyone knows about the change, then choosing not to ask AI doesn’t help you. You can’t opt out of the equilibrium changing.