Economist: AI Writing Offloads the Cost of Understanding From Writers to Readers
paulnovosad · x · 2026-09-28
Economist Paul Novosad draws a sharp analogy between vibe coding and AI writing: in coding, everyone admits that AI-generated code trades efficiency for understanding and demands extra testing — nobody claims to understand code they didn't write as well as their own. Yet with AI writing, people still insist they're just as attentive as before, which he calls self-deception.
His argument: AI writing mostly saves the writer time while pushing the extra cost of making sense of things onto the reader.
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