Emma Thompson on “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert,” Nov. 14, 2025
November 2025
Artificial Intelligence, with its rapidly growing capabilities and the massive financial investment in it, is all over the news. Many people are in a panic over how their livelihoods and quality of life will be affected. The actor and screenwriter Emma Thompson recently contributed to this deluge of concern when she was a guest on Stephen Colbert’s late-night show. (Although Thompson is more famous for her acting work, she is also an accomplished screenwriter. Her film adaptation of Jane Austen’s novel Sense and Sensibility won an Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay.) Colbert noted that a lot of creators are now worried about AI and asked for her view. Her initial measured reply was “intense irritation.” That quickly escalated to a comic rant that later went viral. (See clip here.) Thompson explained that she writes her first drafts in longhand and then types the draft into Microsoft Word. Lately Word insists on asking her, “Would you like me to rewrite that for you?” To which she shouts back: “I don’t need you to rewrite what I’ve just written! Will you fuck off?” I recognize a kindred spirit.
As it happens, Thompson’s practice for first drafts is the same as mine, and for the same reason. We believe that when we write in longhand, the pencil moving across paper pulls ideas from the head better than when we peck at a keyboard. Once I have the first draft written, then I’m mostly at the keyboard for subsequent drafts.
Thompson’s tirade sent me pondering my own relationship with AI. Around 2019 AI programs entered the public sphere. By January 2023 ChatGPT became the fastest-growing consumer software in history, attracting over 100 million users in two months. I have instinctively resisted using AI – until this year. Some months back I resigned my Luddite membership and began using Microsoft Copilot. Presented as my “AI companion,” it showed up one day, unbeckoned, on my laptop’s taskbar. I let Copilot stick around, but I keep it on a short leash. I use it for the digital dictionary and thesaurus capabilities, and as a research assistant for mundane tasks like fetching birth and death dates of historical figures, and geographical details. For example, a question I asked of it last week was, In what county in Iowa is the city of Montrose located? I needed that factoid for Journeys to Zion, my current history book project. If and when you read Journeys, you will find Lee County, Iowa buried on one of its 400 pages. Thank you, AI. I used to go to Google for such searches, but Google became so polluted with advertising that I gave it up.
Even though I now utilize AI in only a rudimentary way, I feel a nagging discomfort. A younger person might ask what am I so worried about? Well, I’ll tell you. I sense a jealous writer’s muse peering over my shoulder. Will I adhere to the constraints I have imposed on my AI use? Will I permit AI-creep? How seductive will AI be as it gets more powerful? Will I eventually tell my muse, Thanks but your services are no longer required.
I do worry that using AI will degrade my writing skills, such as they are. Older readers will recall advertisements from decades ago that depicted a human skull containing, as I recall, what looked like shriveled, moldy oatmeal, topped by the headline, “This is your brain on drugs.” Will similar warnings now start appearing: “This is your brain after outsourcing too much cognitive labor to AI.” My concern partly stems from recent research that suggests overuse of AI can erode the very cognitive skills it claims to support. A 2025 MIT Media Lab study found that excessive use of AI may contribute to cognitive atrophy and a decline in critical thinking abilities. A 2025 Duke University study found that AI-assisted reading led to drops in comprehension accuracy of between 12% and 25%. And a 2025 MIT experiment found that participants who used ChatGPT to write essays showed significantly lower cognitive engagement and retention. Over four sessions, those who relied on AI struggled to recall content and felt less ownership of their work. When they switched back to brain-only writing, performance was inferior to their pre-AI work.
Technology often tempts us with the prospect of making things easier, of reducing friction. A simple example is shopping on Amazon. That website certainly makes it easier to buy things. But is that always to our benefit? It is only later that we realize we didn’t really need some purchases and if buying them had been more difficult, the home would be less cluttered, the bank balance a little fatter. Eliminating friction is not necessarily positive. Maintaining physical fitness offers another example; there is often truth behind the training athlete’s cliché: no pain, no gain.
Underneath my fretting about AI is a more fundamental angst, one philosophical and existential. The prospect of letting AI compose sentences and paragraphs and organize essays, chapters, or scenes – activities I struggle with, but which give my life purpose – I find dispiriting. Puzzling thoughts out, wrestling them to the ground until they say Uncle! and cough up insights; creating art, writing, and music; aren’t these activities that make our species special? If machines can do these things, then maybe we’re not as special as for millennia we assumed. Letting AI do work for me, decide what to put in or take out of an essay, script, or book, would represent a loss of agency. I need to believe that I am the creator of my creation, not just an administrator of a new technology called AI.
Can AI think like we do or will it soon be able to? How will we know when that moment of superior understanding arrives? As James Somers frames the question in a recent masterly overview of AI’s evolution: “How convincing does the illusion of understanding have to be before you stop calling it an illusion?” (The New Yorker, Nov. 10, 2025). Maybe if something looks like a duck, walks and quacks like a duck, then perhaps it really is a duck and not just a clever simulacrum. When AI thinks as well as or better than us, will we not have been knocked off our perch as apex thinkers? The prospect makes me shudder.
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My upcoming book Journeys to Zion is about religions and emigration in the nineteenth century, as lived through the lives of my ancestors. Emphasis is given to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints ("Mormons") and the Utah Territory. If you would like updates on the publication of Journeys to Zion, please join the email list here. Your email address will not be shared.