Content revision ea31a3343577b30cee4337cf2fef2b0864a5741341f27598e9108766c486fb2d

## Are there practices that could help writers use AI without bypassing the work that expands what they are able to question, defend, or develop?

How AI changes the course of writing
Source ID research-ai-writing-interview:designing-assistance
Original https://www.henryw.me/#/research/ai-writing-interview#designing-assistance

Henry Wang I think there are two separate parts of the interaction that matter here. One is what the AI contributes. If I am stuck between two ideas, it can give me the connection needed to move forward. But it could also surface other relations around the problem that are not necessary for solving the immediate difficulty and might open up other directions. The other is how that contribution is presented. The same underlying connection could arrive as a finished interpretation, a question, a tension to resolve, two competing frames, or a counterexample. Those forms leave very different amounts of construction for the writer to do. There is some evidence that this difference in form matters. In Don't Just Tell Me, Ask Me, framing similar information as questions rather than direct explanations led people to reason with it differently (Danry et al., 2023).

That is close to what I have in mind here. The contribution can be similar, while the way it is presented changes what the person still has to work out for themselves. Sometimes a finished answer is exactly what I want. If I have already done the conceptual work and am stuck on wording, there may be little value in making the interaction more elaborate. The more difficult case is when I am still trying to understand the material. Then I would want the system to help without simply turning every local difficulty into a stopping point. That could mean leaving some of the construction for me to do, or bringing in connections that expand the problem beyond the one I have already formulated. I still don't know exactly how a system should decide what to contribute, or in what form, given the task and the writer's state at that moment. That's something I'm interested in pursuing next.