Mollick, a Wharton professor who studies AI and work, explains why he writes first drafts and peer reviews himself before consulting AI. He does use the models afterward, for example to fact-check his books, which turned up errors in his own work and in work he cited.
And I remove phrases. The things I say every time my kids say to me, you sound like, you know, I think Claude was based on you because we have a similar kind of speak. Like, so like, that's a problem for me. But like, yes, that's part of my reaction is to show you. I view that.
Sorry. Again, it's sorry to interrupt. I view that like saying to me, you know, Keating, you dye your hair, you know, stop dyeing your hair. But I view that as a compliment. Oh, you sound like Claude. Well, I wrote it myself. So Claude sounds like me or sounds like Ethan.
…second pass, never as a first pass. It's actually interesting. I study innovation and brainstorming was invented in 1955. And by 1957, we knew it was a terrible idea because the problem is as soon as you do any group process, your ideas fit the group, right? So you always want to start working on your own before anything else. Adam's written about this as well. I feel the same way about writing. If the AI writes, it will write a seductive, wonderful section that I will not be able to get out of my head and will influence my writing. So I have to write my own replies first to things, right? And for reviews, I have to do my own review. Then the question becomes in the bigger question of science, okay, the AI's going to follow. I mean, one of the, so it was funny. I fact-checked coexistence with AI and it was great. There was no errors, but it also not only found errors in my work, but it found an error in the work I was…
I mean, the dirty secret of publishing is that, you know, 90% of the time, at least, you know, previously, we're emailing docx files across the country to our agents and our
editors. And I don't know, you know, I'm writing my fifth book now and I don't even talk to my editor half the time. I just put into Claude Fable to turn it up and say, well, I say it has guardrails. It can't write anything for me. It can tell me what I need to dictate or to type out or write.…
you used a typewriter probably when you were a kid. I certainly did. I'm a little older than you, I think. And the keys were set on the QWERTY keyboard such that they wouldn't interfere with each other because the word frequency was set such that it was less efficient to type with than Dvorak…
