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I write by hand before I open my laptop. This is less noble than it sounds. The page may hold the beginning of an essay, a sentence I will later cross out, a note to buy coriander or toothpaste, or to call Mummy. A notebook does not care about hierarchy. It takes the thought and the shopping list in the order they arrive.
I have become more protective of this practice since using Artificial Intelligence (AI). My black Moleskine soft cover notebook is where I discover what I think, often by writing something inadequate and letting it rest. I do not want a machine waiting with a fluent answer before I have managed my own awkward one.
For years, I wanted little to do with AI, especially in writing. I had spent decades developing judgment and taste through creative direction, branding, and leadership. Language carries memory, geography, humour and all the irregularities through which one person becomes recognisable to another. A machine’s polished approximation of human expression felt absurd and depressing.
“The best use of AI is when it expands your thinking and not when it replaces the act of thinking. Sometimes I use it to verify facts, sometimes for quick research, sometimes to structure a thought, and very often to challenge an idea. One thing I use it a lot for is a pre-mortem.”Rahul MishraFashion designer
A 2025 study of 319 knowledge workers, published during the Computer-Human Interaction conference in Japan, found that greater confidence in generative AI was associated with less critical thinking. The nature of the work had also changed, with people moving from doing a task towards checking, integrating, and supervising a machine’s answer. I found that interesting because it described something I had already begun to worry about.
