Writing is a craft. Thinking is something else.

Folks. It's damn well time to clean up the way we talk about AI, writing and people.

Most recently, on this week's Mediepodden, Olle Lidbom said: ‘I find it very difficult to understand why, as a thinking person, you wouldn't enjoy writing. It's sort of part of thinking.’

That is so unbelievably patronising, and so extraordinarily narrow-minded, that I can barely breathe.

Olle, you are not the yardstick. Not everyone is like you. And thinking can happen perfectly well without being good at writing.

Ask Darwin, who wrote later in life that he still found it difficult to express himself clearly and concisely. Ask Einstein: ”The words or the language, as they are written or spoken, do not seem to play any role in my mechanism of thought.” Ask Yeats, the Nobel laureate who never learned to spell. Ask John Irving, a dyslexic who struggled to get a C-minus in English. Ask Agatha Christie, who found writing and spelling terribly difficult and dictated several of her later books.

Or ask the millions of Swedes you put down with your comments.

Writing is a craft. Thinking is something else. This isn't even particularly controversial: in a 2024 review in Nature, MIT researcher Evelina Fedorenko and her colleagues conclude that language is primarily a tool for communication, not a prerequisite for thought. The brain's language system is essentially quiet when we reason.

And it isn't just Olle, of course. Swedish LinkedIn is overflowing with variations on the same condescending attitude. The media are falling over one another to signal their opposition to AI. Everywhere, the same...

We should be enormously grateful and happy that there is FINALLY a way for so many people to get what happens in their heads out into comprehensible text. Stop seeing AI as cheating. See it as smart. And as something utterly, utterly natural.

A few figures, as far as they can be estimated: → An estimated 5–10 per cent have dyslexia. Roughly half a million to a million people. → Add broader reading and writing difficulties and, depending on the definition, we end up somewhere between 1 and 3 million. → Among people born abroad, roughly a third, around 570,000 people, have reading difficulties. The test is in Swedish, and many may well have strong literacy skills in another language. → PIAAC measures reading, not writing. Formulating a clear text yourself is harder for most people. My working hypothesis: at least as many people struggle with that. → And everyone who simply isn't a ‘text person’? There is no good measurement. My guess: 3–5 million adults. Note the word guess.

This is no marginal group. It's a large part of Sweden. And now they have a tool.

It isn't cheating. It's smart. And for many, it's the first time they get to, are able to or dare to participate in public conversation. Stop stigmatising their use of AI.

[Footnote: I know the writers above worked through their difficulties in different ways. But surely we shouldn't have to demand that of everyone now that there are alternative routes from thought to comprehensible text.]