AI didn’t ruin your writing. It removed your reason to edit.
A lesson from photography explains what’s actually going wrong with your AI drafts.
Film cameras had a built-in constraint: every frame cost money. That cost forced you to think before you pressed the shutter.
Phone cameras removed that ceiling. Now you can take two hundred photos of the same sunset and sort them out later.
That shift explains something that’s been bugging me about AI writing, and I think it applies directly to how lawyers use these tools.
The crop teaches the eye
Cropping is what filled the gap that cost used to fill. When a photo isn’t framed right, and you crop it down to the part that works, you’re doing the job the viewfinder used to do — deciding what matters and what doesn’t.
Do that enough times and something shifts. You start seeing the shot before you take it. You need the crop less, because you already found the frame. The habit of cutting is what taught you to compose.
AI drafts have the same problem
The trouble with a mediocre AI draft was never that AI writes badly. It’s that most of us aren’t imposing any constraint on ourselves anymore.
A blank page used to force you to choose your words before you committed to them. AI removes that friction — you can generate five versions of a demand letter or a client email in the time it used to take to write one.
Nothing gets sharpened, because nothing has to survive a cut.
The contact sheet exercise
Here’s a way to rebuild that muscle. Treat every AI draft like a contact sheet from film photography — a sheet of thumbnail exposures where a photographer had to pick one to develop.
Try this:
Don’t edit top to bottom. Read the whole draft first, then stop.
Pick one paragraph, or even one sentence, that has to survive.
Explain why — out loud or in writing. Not “this is fine,” but the specific reason it does something the rest doesn’t.
The picking is the whole exercise. It works because it forces you to locate the standard yourself, instead of letting the AI hand you one.
Bottom line
The goal was never to use AI less. It’s to build the eye that knows what to cut, and that eye only grows through the repeated act of cutting.
If you notice you’re accepting more of what AI gives you on the first try, that’s worth a second look. It might not mean you’re getting better. It might mean you’ve stopped selecting.
;-)
Ernie
P.S. In the Inner Circle, we talk through drafts like this together — comparing what each of us cut and why. That back-and-forth builds judgment faster than editing alone ever does.
→ https://ernietheattorney.net/