Writing has never been easy. When faced with the prospect of a blank page staring back at you, it’s more tempting than ever to open up a chatbot and type in a quick prompt. Your screen starts to fill with a reassuring parade of clever sounding words that are all, sort of, what you wanted to write. But writing is not really about the words. It’s about bridging the distance between two minds and trying to create a shared understanding. The point of writing is to show, explain or share something with a reader, and key to that is knowing what you want to say.

This key step is the hardest part of writing. As we have noted before, AI is no substitute for having something to say1. Different approaches work for different people: making bullet points, talking out loud to a mirror (or to your cat), bouncing ideas around with a friend, or perhaps even striking up a conversation with a chatbot. But even after you think you’ve figured out what you want to say, and it makes perfect sense in your mind, you might write down your ideas, share it with a reader, and have them respond with the words “I don’t think I really understood that”. Engaging with this feedback can reveal gaps in your understanding of the topic, or gaps of reasoning in your argument. Addressing these gaps helps you clarify your thoughts and ultimately leads to a clearer piece of writing. This conversation, between two (or more) people, is the crux of good writing.

Credit: OFFICEK, Japan/Alamy

When you write for Nature Reviews Physics, we, the editors, are on hand to help you with this iterative process of refining your work to make it accessible and informative for others. But before you even start writing, you need to identify the core message you want to share.

For a review article, the challenge is to identify a good angle. A chatbot — or other search tools — can be useful to provide an overview of the recent literature, but only an expert working in the field has the awareness and intuition to identify the gaps in current understanding and the most meaningful way to bring together recent results to provide new scientific insight. Crucially, you have the ability to make a judgement about whether this angle will be helpful and interesting to your fellow researchers. A chatbot cannot make this call.

For a comment piece, the process is similar. You need to identify an opinion or an argument that you would like to share with the physics community. It could be something that has come up in conversation with fellow researchers, or it could be something that nobody is saying but you think is important for the community to engage with. Only you can identify your opinion, not a chatbot.

Once you know what you want to say, just say it. The issue with using a chatbot at this stage to ‘flesh out your idea’ is that the core message is likely to get lost among a barrage of words. Instead, it’s much better to make your point simply, logically and clearly and then share the draft with a reader to get feedback. As editors, our role is to be a friendly — but critical — reader and highlight the gaps in your writing that may be misleading or confusing to others. Through our editing, we are engaging in a conversation with you, to better understand your point, and to help you convey your intended meaning in the simplest, clearest way possible.

“Once you know what you want to say, just say it”

While writing this editorial, we started by prompting a chatbot to “write an editorial for Nature Reviews Physics about writing in the age of chatbots”. It came back with a series of points about the importance of “conceptual integrity” and how it is important to “prioritize structure over ornamentation”. It’s not that these points are untrue or invalid, but it didn’t reach the heart of what we were trying to say. In fact, we weren’t quite sure what the chatbot was trying to say, because of course, it wasn’t trying to make a point, but just to share words around the theme we had prompted. In the end, we made some tea and talked to each other about what we wanted to write and why. We hope that this piece connected with you as a reader and gave you the confidence to connect with other readers through your writing.