Thinking Is Formulating

I’ve probably written a thousand texts in my life. Not all of them were good. But in almost every one, something happened that I didn’t know beforehand. Not because I researched. Because I wrote. The act of writing produced the thought. Not the other way around.

AI is commonly described as a “writing assistant.” It helps with “phrasing and structuring.” That sounds like a harmless division of labor. You think, the machine puts it into words. You have the thought, it finds the phrasing. Neatly separated.

Except thinking doesn’t work that way.

Thinking isn’t something that happens in your head and then gets written down. Thinking happens while you write. The sentence you start takes you somewhere different than planned. The word you choose opens a direction you hadn’t seen before. The structure you give a text isn’t the packaging of a finished thought. It is the thought.

Anyone who writes knows this. You sit down with a thesis. Three paragraphs later you realize the thesis is wrong. Not because someone objected. Because the act of formulating forced you to be precise. And precision reveals gaps.

When a machine takes over the formulating, you skip exactly this moment. You enter a thought that’s vague and get back a text that sounds precise. The vagueness isn’t resolved. It’s papered over. The text reads as though the thought were clear. But it was never thought through to the end. It was formulated to the end. By a machine that doesn’t notice when something is off.

There’s a reason philosophers write. Not dictate, not have things summarized, not use “phrasing assistance.” Wittgenstein rearranged sentences until they were right. Not because he was pedantic. Because the order was the thought. Because the difference between “The world is everything that is the case” and “Everything that is the case is the world” isn’t style. It’s philosophy.

Treating formulation as surface means pretending a text has content and form, and that form can be delegated. But this separation doesn’t exist. Content arises in form. Whoever gives up the formulation doesn’t give up the packaging. They give up the thinking process.

I tested this myself. I asked an AI to formulate one of my thoughts. The result was a text that read like something I might have written. But it didn’t say what I meant. It said something similar. Something plausible. Something that pointed in the right direction but missed the point. Hitting the point would have meant trying three wrong formulations and understanding why they were wrong. The machine skipped that process.

“Structuring” is the second promise. The AI helps with structure. But structure isn’t an outline. Structure is the logic of an argument. The order in which thoughts appear determines what they mean. The same argument in a different order is a different argument. Whoever delegates the structure delegates the reasoning.

And that’s where it stops being a question of efficiency and starts being a question of responsibility. If a manager has AI structure their strategy, whose strategy is it? If a consultant has AI formulate their recommendation, whose recommendation is it?

The industry sees AI as a writing assistant. I see a machine occupying the last space where humans still had to think for themselves. Not because they can’t. Because it’s hard work. And because the machine delivers output that looks like thinking, without anyone having to think.

The result is texts that read as though someone reflected. Strategies that sound as though someone thought them through. Arguments that seem as though someone tested them. But nobody reflected, thought through, tested. The machine formulated. And formulation without thinking is just surface.