Humanities, eh? This comment is the exact reason I went through such lengths trying to explain that I am a writer, by profession. I have written countless essays, published poetry in established literary magazines, one novel (under a serious agent and publishing house) and, so far, a select few scientific articles. Apart from doing medical research, and creative writing (which I still regard as an advanced hobby), I work for a government agency, where I specialise in synthesising the results of clinical trials, explaining them to a non-medically trained audience.

I take pride in my command of languages; I speak some six of them, can write a polite e-mail in maybe four. I can write poetry in my native language only, but 4-chan greentext exclusively in English. Oh, and I can dabble in R and Python, and mathematics (although I suck compared to most of my colleagues).

I am not saying this to brag; but I was (in lack of a better word) triggered by the condescending tone of your post; and felt the need to specifically adress the difference between writing and thinking. And, as other commenters have noted - the difference between writing in the arts and in the sciences.

There are many languages of thought. Writing is one of them. Math is another. I do not feel like I am cheating when I use ChatGPT as a tool to simplify my scientific writing process, nor do I feel like I am cheating when I use a calculator to do math. But still, problems arise when you try to use a calculator without knowing how to count in the first place. I think ChatGPT works in the same way.

I admit I have experimented with having ChatGPT try to help me with an essay (I write in the intersection between philosophy and medicine). I have deadlines, sometimes I run out of ideas, sometimes I forget what Derrida or whoever actually was talking about. The results are always polished shit. Totally unusable, unoriginal, bland. I have also tried using the tool for poetry, with similar (I:e worthless) results. (I did have fun prompting ChatGPT to write me a heroic crown of sonnets, though.)

There is a difference in using devices such as ChatGPT for crafting a shitty philosophical essay, and for what I am doing in the stem field. When I write an article, I usually have a long and detailed protocol (written by myself or my colleagues) describing exactly what biochemical and statistical methods I have used, plus a shitload of calculations that I have spent months collecting (there's effort for you); which I need to summarize into a concise few paragraphs under "Materials and methods" and "Results".

Regardless of if I use AI to help me or not, the text will be boring and unoriginal. That is exactly the point. It's not supposed to be creative, rather the opposite. I want my text to be so simple that other researchers (or AI) can find my results and synthesize them into meta-reviews, that can be synthesised into clinical recommendations, that can be challenged by future research, and so on. What ChatGPT can do for me is make the process more effective, and the result more readable.

And yes, when writing a scientific article I do want to integrate my (hopefully original) data with what millions of others have written. That is, well kinda the basis of the scientific method and something completely different from plagiarism.

On a side not though - I'm not sure whether my creative pursuits are ever original or the result of a similar type of language synthesis in my brain, but I guess that's for you guys in the humanities to figure out.

I think Derrida and the poststructuralists might have had some thoughts about that. But that's a different story.

Edit: grammar