Content revision ea31a3343577b30cee4337cf2fef2b0864a5741341f27598e9108766c486fb2d

## How did you arrive at the concept of early epistemic settlement? Was there a particular writing experience or limitation in the existing research that led you to it?

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

Henry Wang I started from a fairly simple observation about what AI changes in writing. Writing has often been treated as part of thinking, not just a way of recording thought after the thinking is finished. Menary's Writing as Thinking captures this well (Menary, 2007). You write something, see what follows from it, realize that two claims do not quite fit, go back to the material, move things around, and sometimes end up thinking something you could not have stated when you began. The text develops along with your understanding. AI makes it much easier for those two things to come apart. Suppose I have two pieces of evidence and cannot yet work out how they fit into one argument. Previously, if I wanted the paragraph to work, I would usually have to form enough of that connection myself to write it. A teacher, editor, book, or colleague could of course help.

But with a language model I can keep giving it the problem in front of me and get a coherent next step back. So the text can keep developing even when I did not have to build all of the connections that made that development possible. That made me wonder whether anything had been lost. If the argument is good, I understand it, and I can keep reasoning from it, is that enough? There was already work showing that AI changes what people produce. One result I found interesting was that AI assistance could improve individual creative outputs while also making different people's outputs more similar (Doshi & Hauser, 2024). What I wanted to understand was what was happening inside one person's inquiry. What changed between the point where they were still trying to form a relation and the point where they had been given one that worked?

My background in cognitive modelling probably also shaped this. I tend to think about how someone's internal structure changes over time, so the finished text alone did not really explain what interested me. I wanted to know what happened to the writer's own construction process and cognitive development through working with AI. That is where early epistemic settlement came from. Tequia Burt 02