Tim O'Reilly argues that "AI is a medium, like painting, sculpture, photography, music, or language itself. If AI is a medium, it is a field of possibility from which humans can and will summon up and communicate insights, truth, beauty." This may be true, but we need to understand that what we create using AI is different from what it putatively replaces, just as what we create using photography is different from what we create using paint and brush. So (in my view) AI-based writing is producing something different from what is created when we write without using AI. How to express this difference? Well, here's a hint. O'Reilly describes how AI helped him write this post, saying "There are perhaps 40 or 50 words supplied by Claude, including the quotes from Delaroche and Baudelaire... I had read Baudelaire but I'd never heard of Delaroche." Now, when I reference someone, it's typically because I had previously read what I'm referencing, and I found the association myself. But here we have Delaroche being plucked out of the air by O'Reilly, not based on any previous experience, but because of Claude. Did O'Reilly go back and read and become familiar with Delaroche? No - he "verified both quotes by checking the original sources and reading a bit more about the ferment of the time". So what did O'Reilly mean when he inserted the quote? We don't know.
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