Writing as a Living Source: Thinking Through the Industrialization of Thought in the Age of Artificial Intelligence

The arrival of artificial intelligences transforms the very nature of writing and intellectual production in general. I propose here a reflection on a rich and specifically human way of shifting intellectual work: from drafting toward capturing authentic experiences.

The Shift in Writing Work

I observe a profound transformation in the practice of intellectual work in general and writing in particular. What traditionally constituted the heart of intellectual labor—drafting itself, formatting, structuring—is shifting toward another territory: that of lived experience, of presence to situations, of documenting the everyday. Artificial intelligence cannot live, feel, sense, make mistakes, improvise. It cannot (yet) accumulate that raw material that constitutes embodied human experience. This reality redefines the role of the human being, of the author.

What I call the “work of the source” may echo what Dominique Cardon formulates when he states that “if we make the digital, it also makes us” (Digital Culture, 2019). Technology is never external to thought processes; it configures them while being configured by them. Artificial intelligence tools do not replace human thought; they reveal its specificity: our capacity to be present to the world, to live singular situations, to capture nuances that only embodiment allows.

Bernard Stiegler reminds us that “knowledge is always a knowledge of how to bifurcate” (Automatic Society. 1. The Future of Work, 2015). To bifurcate means to invent new ways of working with the technologies that transform us. Writing with artificial intelligence is not an abdication of thought, but a bifurcation: I focus on what only I can do—live authentically and embody, namely create raw material from singular experiences—while the machine accomplishes what it does well, that is, structure, reformulate, organize according to learned patterns. Our role, and what would define us as humans, is to live experiences fully and above all to document them in a “raw” way, because if we do not document them, we will have no “source.” I realize that for more than twenty years—long before generative artificial intelligences—I have taken the trouble to record public interventions and mediation situations, to keep a work journal, to scan the written traces of processes, because I knew, without knowing how it would be carried out, but knowing that it would be by machines, that one day these traces would take on their full meaning as “sources,” and would allow me to discover new knowledge. I have created a form of ethnographic collection of my own work.

The Industrialization of Thought

Walter Benjamin observed that in the age of mechanical reproduction, art lost its aura but gained in democratic accessibility (The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, 1935). The technique of reproduction “detaches the reproduced object from the realm of tradition” and enables its multiplication. Today we are experiencing a comparable mutation, but one that concerns thought itself. Industrialization allowed one person to produce many more objects thanks to machines. Now, one person can produce many more shareable intellectual productions.

This industrialization of thought does not distort it; it multiplies it. From daily documentation, I can produce several books from different angles, explore various thematic entries, reach varied audiences. What would have required years of solitary work can now unfold in a few weeks. The question is no longer whether we have time to write well, but recognizing that the demand for writing lies elsewhere: in the quality of the source, in the authenticity of the documented experience.

As Mark Alizart proposes in Celestial Computing (2017), the digital is not foreign to us, “nature is a form of computing”. The machines we create extend our own functioning; they do not betray it. Artificial intelligence reveals that intelligence is no longer the exclusive property of human beings, but it cannot replace what still constitutes our deep humanity: empathy, imagination, improvisation, the capacity to feel and to transform feeling into thinking matter.

Sharing as a Mode of Writing

Daily writing, regular, like a breath necessary for life, as Rainer Maria Rilke imagined it very well (Letters to a Young Poet, 1929), this demand that is now mine, forms the basis of a system of intellectual production that exceeds me. Each text is a seed sown. I no longer have to fear lacking time to write well; I can write immediately, even partially, because this material accumulates and progressively forms a corpus that can be explored through multiple entries.

This writing practice flows in both directions: it nourishes my daily thought while being nourished by it. Bernard Stiegler speaks of “tooled memory” (Economy of Hypermaterial and Psychopower, 2008). Our memory is never purely internal; it relies on external supports, traces, tools. Daily writing becomes a mnemotechnic system that structures thought while documenting it. Artificial intelligence can then navigate through this documented memory to draw out syntheses, developments, variations.

Sharing is no longer a secondary moment that comes after writing; it becomes constitutive of it. Publishing freely on a website rather than through the traditional circuit of publishing means choosing the freedom of immediate action. It means recognizing that value does not reside in controlling distribution but in the quality of the source. Serge Tisseron warns us: “The question is not whether we will communicate with avatars as with human beings, but whether we will reduce the humans behind their avatars” (2023). The digital does not erase the human; it invites us to keep the authentic relationship behind interfaces alive.

A New Form of Collaboration

Collaboration with artificial intelligence also legitimizes the mode of writing in successive layers, which allows me to open the door to the possibility of writing, freed from the perfectionism that freezes the creative process:

1. The first layer consists of producing raw material: journal, notes, fragmentary articles.
2. The second layer structures this material according to a plan, an angle.
3. The third layer drafts and formats.
4. The fourth layer performs a critical rereading.

This sequential process allows faster access to the distance necessary for any rigorous intellectual work, whether one does it oneself, in collaboration as part of multi-hand writing, or in collaboration with AIs.

This method recalls what Sigmund Freud described in his Note on the Mystic Writing Pad (1925): the superposition of layers that inscribe themselves upon one another, partially erase themselves, leave traces. Writing with artificial intelligence operates according to this principle of digital palimpsest: each iteration enriches the text, refines the thought, without completely erasing the previous layers that remain accessible.

I do not produce alone, but I remain the author because I am the source. And before AI, I did not produce alone either; all my texts and articles were reread, corrected, sometimes largely rewritten, by colleagues, just as I could do for them as well. Artificial intelligence can write in my manner because it has learned from my corpus, but it cannot yet live what I live. This fundamental asymmetry redefines authorship: to be an author means to be at the origin of authentic experiences, to create unique documentation, to carry a singular voice. Drafting becomes a shared process, but intellectual and ethical responsibility remains fully human.

This approach frees up time for what truly matters: continuing to live intensely, to document the present, to nourish that inexhaustible source that constitutes human experience. Rather than exhausting oneself in laborious formatting work, one can remain in the spontaneity of the everyday while producing rigorous and shareable thought. Artificial intelligence becomes a tool of emancipation, provided one bifurcates, as Stiegler suggests, and invents one’s own rules of use rather than submitting to those imposed by default, or believing that what is at work today would be a “replacement.” No, it is a factor of intellectual emancipation.