AI-assisted writing can extend a writer’s creative life

The debate over artificial intelligence (AI) and writing seems destined to have no definitive conclusion.

New York Times columnist Bret Stephens has pleaded with readers not to write with AI, arguing that writing is inseparable from thinking and that outsourcing the former eventually weakens the latter. Others make a more accommodating case: Use AI as a copy editor, researcher, critic, or sparring partner, but do not let it replace the mental struggle through which ideas take shape.

I understand the arguments about AI writing. I also use AI. I have been open about how AI tools play a selective role in parts of my writing and development process, including drafting, revision, language refinement, and the synthesis of complex information. I review, revise, reject, reorganize, and rewrite the output those tools produce. The final content is mine, and I retain responsibility for its accuracy, integrity, and originality.

But there is another reason I use AI that I rarely see discussed. I use it because I am running out of time.

That statement sounds more ominous than I intend. I do not have a terminal illness, nor am I writing a literary farewell. I was born in 1954, and I am simply acknowledging an arithmetic fact that becomes harder to ignore with age: There are more years behind me than ahead of me. I have a great deal left to say. Almost all of it concerns medicine.

I want to write about AI (ironically enough) and its impact on clinical judgment, responsibility, education, and the physician-patient relationship. I want to write about leadership and why physicians should exercise more of it. I want to write about career development, medical education, the medical-industrial complex, professionalism, burnout, moral injury, technology, and the peculiar ways a healing profession can lose sight of the very person it is meant to heal.

The limiting resource is not ideas. It is time. That changes how I view AI.

For a student learning to write, difficulty may be part of the curriculum. Wrestling with a paragraph teaches a student to organize an argument. Discovering that an idea falls apart when put into words is, in itself, an education. I would not want AI to deprive a young writer of that experience.

But I am no longer learning how to think about medicine. After roughly half a century in and around the profession, I have accumulated more observations than I am likely to turn into essays, stories, and books on my own. The bottleneck is increasingly not conception but production: turning the thoughts already in my head into forms others can read.

That is where AI becomes valuable to me: its speed. Speed is usually treated as one of AI’s conveniences. It drafts an email, summarizes a document, and reorganizes notes faster. For me, speed has taken on another meaning. It gives me more time to write. More writing time gives me more writing life.

An hour saved polishing one passage is an hour available to develop another idea. A morning saved organizing research may become an afternoon spent constructing an essay. If AI helps me move more quickly from a rough concept to something I can interrogate, revise, and make my own, the benefit is not merely efficiency. It is additional creative capacity within a finite lifespan. That is very different from asking a machine to think so I do not have to.

I sometimes think of myself less as the solitary writer at a desk and more as the creative director, producer, and editor of a film. I know what the project is about. I choose the subject. I audition the talent. I decide what belongs and what does not. I set the tone. I recognize the false note. I call for another take. I cut entire scenes. I decide when the work is finished.

AI is unquestionably somewhere in the credits, but it is not the director.

The distinction is important because much of the criticism of AI-assisted writing assumes that the goal is to avoid thinking. Sometimes it undoubtedly is. A student who asks a chatbot to write an essay about a book he has not read is avoiding intellectual work. A professional who sends an argument she has never considered because software generated something plausible is outsourcing judgment.

That is not the transaction I am seeking. I want AI to shorten the distance between what I have thought and what I can publish. Sometimes it drafts. Sometimes I draft, and it revises. Sometimes it tells me an argument has a hole. Sometimes it produces a perfect sentence that I immediately delete because it does not sound like me. Sometimes it gives me exactly the phrase I was struggling to find. And sometimes its greatest contribution is provoking me to say, “No. That isn’t what I mean at all.” That, too, can be thinking.

The emerging discussion about AI and older adults understandably centers on assistance: helping people communicate, overcome physical or language barriers, organize memories, tell life stories, or engage in reminiscence. Researchers are already exploring AI-supported storytelling and reminiscence for older adults. But there may be another category of older AI user worth considering. Not someone who needs help remembering the past, but someone who feels an increasing urgency to contribute to the future.

There is a peculiar psychological shift when time stops feeling abstract. At thirty, an unwritten essay can wait. At forty, the book can be written someday. At seventy-plus, “someday” becomes a less satisfying publishing strategy.

The ideas start forming a queue. Write me next. And me. Don’t forget about me.

I’m not saying every thought deserves publication or that productivity should become a contest with mortality. I have no interest in turning aging into a frantic race to fill pages. More writing is not inherently better. But there are things I want to leave behind, not as a monument to myself, but as contributions to conversations I have spent a lifetime in.

I have watched medicine change. I have practiced it, studied it, worked within its institutions, watched corporations reshape it, watched technology promise to rescue it, and watched physicians struggle to preserve meaning within it. Some of what I have learned may be wrong. Some will become obsolete. But some may be useful to a physician, a medical student, an administrator, a patient, or a reader I will never meet. I would like to put as much of it on the page as I reasonably can.

So when someone tells me that AI makes writing too easy, I understand the warning. Ease can become dependence, and dependence can dull ability. A machine that perpetually rescues us from the discomfort of forming our own thoughts may eventually leave us unable to form them.

Still, there is another side to the coin. At my stage of life, difficulty is not automatically a virtue, and inefficiency is not proof of authenticity. I do not need to spend 3 hours on a task that can be done responsibly in 1 hour just to prove I am still a writer. I would rather spend those 2 hours recovering, thinking about the next piece worth writing.

The question, therefore, should not be simply “Did you use AI to write this?” That question is becoming almost meaningless to me. Better questions are: Is it my idea? Was I the final judge of the content? Did I ensure it was true? Did I choose what to keep and what to discard? Do I accept responsibility for the final words? And did the technology expand my thinking or replace it?

I know my answers. AI does not give me a reason to write. Medicine has been doing that for 50 years. AI gives me something increasingly precious to write with.

Time.

Arthur Lazarus is a physician-author whose work spans narrative medicine, physician leadership, artificial intelligence, health care ethics, medical culture, and fiction. He has published more than 500 articles and essays across scientific journals, professional publications, and online platforms.

He is the author of numerous books on narrative medicine, AI in medicine, career development, and the changing moral landscape of health care, as well as fictional series including Rounds Never End, Sick and Systemic, and Real Medicine, Unreal Stories. His writing explores the forces reshaping modern medicine while preserving a central commitment to story, meaning, judgment, and the human relationship at the heart of care.

He shares updates on LinkedIn.