Content revision ea31a3343577b30cee4337cf2fef2b0864a5741341f27598e9108766c486fb2d

## What determines whether an AI suggestion settles an inquiry too early or becomes useful material the writer actively works through? How much depends on timing, the writer’s expertise, or the nature of the task?

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

Henry Wang I think this depends on what the writer is doing at the moment the suggestion arrives. Timing matters. If I already understand a relation and just cannot phrase it well, AI may be helping me say something I already know. If trying to write the sentence is how I am still figuring out the relation, the same answer can do something quite different. Expertise probably matters too. An expert usually has more existing relations and constraints for a new suggestion to fit with. Something that sounds coherent to a novice may immediately feel wrong to an expert because it clashes with something else they know. The nature of the task matters as well. Some tasks have a fairly constrained destination but still require substantial construction from the person doing them. If the goal is only to produce a correct artifact, skipping some of that construction may not matter much.

If the construction itself is part of how the person is learning, then the same shortcut changes what they get from doing the task. But this distinction depends on being able to tell how constrained the task really is. From inside an inquiry, that is often difficult to know. You may be slowly working toward something fairly standard, or you may be one connection away from seeing the material differently. You have to decide whether to keep working before you know what that work would produce. That uncertainty seems important to me. It makes the value of continuing difficult to judge from the writer's own position. Tequia Burt 04