Working Overtime

Writing With AI is Harder Than You Think

It takes rigor, judgment, and willingness to be told your work isn't good enough.

Was this newsletter forwarded to you? Sign up to get it in your inbox.

I’ve been feeling personally attacked by my X feed lately. Well, even more than usual. Alongside the usual headline horror shows and barrage of bad takes, writers I respect and admire are on the warpath against writing with AI.

The discourse kicked off late last month when Washington Post columnist Megan McArdle posted about how she uses AI in her work. The reposts were merciless. “Genuinely an insane thing to admit.” “Journalistic dishonesty out in the open.” One person suggested that admitting to AI use should be made “deeply taboo,” even though he acknowledged in the same post that everyone’s going to do it anyway. But the one reaction that stuck with me was journalist Charlotte Alter: “Research is thinking. Outlining is thinking. Writing is thinking. Any portion of that done by AI is less thinking done by you.”

The problem is that so much of AI writing happens in a black box. The critics are imagining the laziest possible version of AI-assisted writing, and the writers who use AI seriously haven’t been showing their work, though that’s starting to change. That silence lets the worst assumptions fill the gap.

I’d rather just show you the whole mess—what is happening in my head when I write with AI, and it’s not what the discourse imagines. By the end, you can decide for yourself whether what I do counts as thinking.

What writing with AI is (and what it isn’t)

Many critics treat the use of AI in writing like a binary: Either the machine wrote it, or you suffered for it. But writing has never been binary. It’s always been a mess of drafting and revising, leaning on editors and borrowing structures, following formulas and breaking them. And no two kinds of writing are exactly alike: A journalist’s process relies on source calls and document requests. A novelist’s includes plotting arcs across 80,000 words. A personal essay, like the ones I write for Every, involves sitting alone with your feelings until they become a thesis statement.

Every writer’s process is different, and most of them would sound unhinged if described in detail. But throw AI into the mix, and suddenly everyone has opinions about the “right” way to get words on a page.

AI data looks nothing like a spreadsheet

Some of our legacy tools are holding us back. AI applications generate unstructured data, like text video, audio, sensor feeds, and user interactions. But traditional databases were designed for structured rows and columns. That’s where MongoDB Atlas comes in. It natively handles JSON-like unstructured data with the flexibility to store, query, and scale diverse datasets without rigid schemas. Plus native vector search, auto-scaling for demand spikes, and multi-cloud deployment across more than 125 regions make it the perfect fit for the AI era.

Try MongoDB Atlas free

Want to sponsor Every? Click here.

My process, start to finish

When people picture “writing with AI,” they picture a transaction. You type a prompt, the AI hands you text, you paste it somewhere, and move on. My process has...

Become a paid subscriber to Every to unlock this piece and learn about:

How to build a panel of AI critics that give you a diverse read of your work
What happened to Katie’s writing anxiety when AI started handling the first draft
The finishing checks she runs to make sure her writing sounds like her