Advait Sarkar

This outline is lightly structured and allows her to sketch out the flow of her argument at a high level.

while still retaining deep connections and being grounded in the source documents, as a result of which we can already generate a draft of the proposal.

And Clara can do things here, like add a heading to the outline to generate a paragraph, but what I want to draw your attention to here is that while this text is AI-generated,

Clara has a completely different relationship to this text than if she just dropped in some documents and said, write me a report, because this text is deeply rooted in a cognitively effortful but interactionally effortless thought process.

It reflects Clara's decisions, Clara's judgments, Clara's unique personal professional expertise.

She sees another provocation, this time in the outline.

In this case, she decides that while the provocation is useful,

She does not need to address it.

Unlike typical AI suggestions, provocations are not meant to be applicable all the time.

They're instead meant to stimulate your thinking about your work.

Because if you understand your work well enough, deeply enough, to make the confident decision not to accept a piece of feedback, then the feedback process is still working as intended.

But we're not done yet.

Clara has entirely new ways of interacting with this text because of generative AI.

A really simple example is that she can just resize a paragraph to change its length.

She can also rapidly test different versions of this text.

And at select strategic points, indeed, she writes.

As she writes, she sees provocations that, rather than auto-completing her ideas, they raise alternatives, they identify fallacies, they offer counter-arguments to help her strengthen and develop her own argument.

There's something you won't find anywhere in this interface, and that's a chat box.

Clara's not having to chat with anything to do her work, yet she is silently and appropriately assisted by her computer as a computer and not as an ersatz human.

Throughout this process, Clara has been assisted, and yes, probably worked faster because of AI.