The other day I was informed that WordPress has an “AI Tool” which can write blog posts for me. I suspect most people think writing a blog is a waste of time, and that is even more the case if you get AI to write posts for you. I write a blog for many reasons apart from that after 17 years it has become a habit. One reason is that writing a post sometimes helps me tease out what I actually think about things. If I don’t feel I can express my thoughts in a reasonably coherent way, it is possible that my thoughts are themselves incoherent. Of course sometimes the lack of clarity in a post is indeed because I didn’t write it very well. Nevertheless, the process of writing helps even if it doesn’t lead to anything like a perfect result.
Writing isn’t just about blog posts, of course. In academic life we write articles and books and other pieces. Some academics give the impression that we do the writing after we’ve done the thinking – or, in scientific fields, after doing the calculations or measurements – but I think writing is an intrinsic part of the process, not something done right at the end.
It was with these thoughts in mind that I decided to share the following post, written by Pat Thomson a former Professor of Education in the School of Education at the University of Nottingham which makes a number of points that are valid across different disciplines.
In the Dark 