L.M. Sacasas, Re-sourcing the Mind:

[Writing] is hard. Many people find it intimidating, perhaps especially when you’ll be expressing yourself in public as in the case of a wedding toast. As Walter Ong, among others has noted, writing is not natural. While the use of language is natural to the human animal, the emergence of writing was not, strictly speaking, necessary. So if writing does not come easily, why not take up a tool that promises to do it for us, particularly in cases that call for something more personal than inconsequential boilerplate?

When we turn to an LLM to write for us, we are also inviting it to undertake the more fundamental task of articulation, and this is no small thing. Indeed, given the centrality of language to the human condition, we should wonder about the degree to which the outsourcing of the labor of articulation is the outsourcing of a fundamentally human activity.

It is not simply the case that articulating ourselves in language is a matter of matching a set of words to a set of internal pre-existing feelings or inchoate impressions, as if the work of articulation left untouched and unchanged what it was we sought to articulate. Rather, the labor of articulation itself shapes what we think and feel. Articulation is not dictation, articulation constitutes our perception of the world.

In the labor of articulation, we put ourselves in play, with all the risks, rewards, burdens, challenges, and consolations that entails. To outsource the labor of articulation is to sideline ourselves.

when we are confronted with the opportunity to outsource the labor of articulation, we will find that possibility more tempting to the degree that we experience a sense of incompetency and inadequacy, a sense which may have many sources, not least among which is the failure to stock our mind, heart, and imagination. There was, after all, a reason why memory was one of the five canons of classical rhetoric.10 It was not just a matter of committing to memory what you had planned to say. It was also a matter of having internal resources to draw on in order to say anything at all.