15/08/2025
Writing vs. AI: How Losing the Pen Could Mean Losing Your Mind - welcome to the August reset!
Let’s face it – most of us are feeling pretty compelled to use AI in everyday writing, both in our personal and workplace lives. Indeed, many organisations are now actively incentivising or forcing us to find ways to replace some of our tasks with the use of AI. So why not just go ahead and generate what seems to be great content in a few seconds?
For me, the loss of individuality is tragic. Neuroscience informs us that the way we write expresses personality, provides ownership, and offers insight that influences future discussions, decision-making, and autonomous action (Higgins, 1996). Active writing also stimulates brain regions involved in executive functions, such as the prefrontal cortex, responsible for planning, problem-solving, and decision-making (Miller and Cohen, 2001). Moreover, personal writing strengthens neural connections between knowledge, language, and memory systems, a process known as cognitive rehearsal (Small, 2010), which leads to better retention, deeper understanding, and sharper critical thinking skills.
Even more crucial, research published in Harvard Health (August 2017) suggests that by age 30, processing speed and memory, may start to decline, causing the breaking apart of synaptic connections—the ‘use it or lose it’ syndrome. Kandel’s research on synaptic plasticity (Kandel, 2001) reveals that the brain’s neural pathways are strengthened or weakened depending on how we engage them. By constantly stimulating these neural connections, we preserve the cognitive abilities that AI, however advanced, can never fully replicate.
Recently, several clients have offered work that, from the syntax and the style, was not original work. And that is the biggest danger of all for organisations. When individuals on boards and teams sit together and discuss business over time, they are creating a collective organisational memory. The ongoing contribution of wisdom and experience (both positive and negative) fuels optimal collective decision-making. Even the smartest, most sophisticated machine tools cannot replicate this human process of learning, adapting and evolving over time.
The middle ground may be to keep human intelligence rigorously separate from machine intelligence. Use our human intelligence first, then run it through AI to see if there are any aspects not taken into account, or further industry experience logged in AI which might be useful, once fact checked. While benfiting from AI, this allows a sense of deliberate control.
What do you think? Do you have a personal plan for AI use in your work, family and day-to-day life? How do you balance the value of human thought and creation, with the tools we’ve created intended to assist?
