Content revision ea31a3343577b30cee4337cf2fef2b0864a5741341f27598e9108766c486fb2d

## Editors and other collaborators can also provide a solution before a writer has completed the underlying thinking. What makes language models different, beyond the speed and frequency with which they can intervene?

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

Henry Wang What seems different to me is how much independent structure tends to enter the exchange. When another person works with my material, they are processing it through their own understanding. In the hybrid-work example, an editor might notice that one interviewee's work depends much more heavily on coordination than the other's. She might also wonder whether the difference has less to do with remote work itself than with how the two teams are managed. Those relations come partly from what she already knows and from the connections she makes while thinking through the material. I may not have needed either of those relations just to move forward. But once she brings them back, I have more to think with, and they may change where the inquiry goes. A very common way of using a language model is different.

I bring it whatever problem is blocking me at the moment and ask how I might continue. If it finds a locally coherent connection that gets me past that difficulty, the interaction has already done what I needed it to do. There may be many other relevant relations the model could surface, but the immediate problem does not require them. It can give me enough structure to continue without expanding the space very much beyond the question I was already able to ask. That can then repeat throughout the draft. I reach a difficulty, get a satisfactory way through it, continue from there, and later return with the next difficulty. Each answer can be useful on its own while the inquiry develops through a sequence of these local resolutions. That is the pattern I was trying to capture in the paper.

A collaborator brings a separately developed structure into the exchange almost by default simply because they have one. With a language model, it is very easy to keep getting help that is closely fitted to the problem as I have already formulated it. Tequia Burt 05