Beyond the analogy of LLMs being a lossy compression of the Web, the point about the creative process is spot on in this article. The more we relegate the creative process to the tools of efficiency, the more we risk the output being mediocre.
Will letting a large language model handle the boilerplate allow writers to focus their attention on the really creative parts?
Obviously, no one can speak for all writers, but let me make the argument that starting with a blurry copy of unoriginal work isn’t a good way to create original work. If you’re a writer, you will write a lot of unoriginal work before you write something original. And the time and effort expended on that unoriginal work isn’t wasted; on the contrary, I would suggest that it is precisely what enables you to eventually create something original. The hours spent choosing the right word and rearranging sentences to better follow one another are what teach you how meaning is conveyed by prose.
Sometimes it’s only in the process of writing that you discover your original ideas.