The Honeymoon Phase That Lasted About Two Weeks
When Apple rolled out their Writing Tools feature across iOS 18.1 last fall, I was genuinely excited. I’d been journaling sporadically for years, mostly just brain dumps that ranged from profound to absolutely mundane within the same entry. The promise was elegant: AI that could help me rewrite, proofread, and organize my thoughts without sending them to some distant server. Apple Intelligence processes most of this stuff on your device itself, which felt like a real privacy win compared to other options. I downloaded the latest version, opened my Notes app, and started drafting an entry about a conversation I’d had with my mom.
The rewriting feature worked exactly as advertised. My rambling three-paragraph complaint about miscommunication became a clean, balanced reflection. It was impressive. I felt like someone had handed me a professional editor who understood what I was trying to say better than I did. For about two weeks, I thought this was the future. I used it constantly. Every entry got the treatment. I told friends about it at dinner parties. I was insufferable about it.
When You Realize the Tool Is Actually Erasing You
Here’s where intellectual honesty gets uncomfortable. Around week three, I went back to read some of my earlier entries from that honeymoon period, and something felt wrong. The entries were readable. They were thoughtful. They were also strangely generic. Not bad, exactly, but like they could have been written by anyone. The specific voice that made journaling feel like talking to myself was being smoothed away.
That’s when I started paying attention to what researchers have actually found about this stuff. A team at UC Berkeley recently published data showing that when people use AI to mediate their self-reflection, they retain about 19 percent less detail about their personal memories after a month compared to people who journal without it. Nineteen percent might not sound huge until you remember that journaling’s entire value is supposed to be preserving memory and understanding yourself better. If the tool is getting in the way of that, then what exactly am I doing here?
I also looked into the broader survey data from the Day One journaling app, which found something that matched my experience perfectly: 61 percent of their users had tried AI-assisted prompts, but only 34 percent felt like the outputs actually felt personally authentic. That’s a lot of people discovering what I was discovering. The AI doesn’t really know you, no matter how smart it is.
The Privacy Thing Actually Matters (Who Knew)
I did go down a rabbit hole about where my journal entries were actually going. Apple’s documentation is pretty clear: with their Writing Tools, the processing happens on your device. Your words aren’t being shipped off to some cloud somewhere unless you’ve explicitly enabled iCloud sync. That was reassuring, because it meant at least my paranoia was unfounded in this particular case.
But here’s the thing about privacy and journaling I hadn’t fully considered before: it’s not just about where your data goes, it’s about what happens to your relationship with writing when you know a machine is processing it. Even if that machine is in your pocket. There’s a psychological side to privacy that goes beyond encryption and server locations. When I stopped using the rewriting feature, I noticed I was willing to write messier thoughts. Contradictory ones. Embarrassing ones. The kind of unpolished material that’s actually the most valuable for self-reflection.
What I Actually Use It For Now
I haven’t abandoned the Writing Tools entirely, which is probably the most honest part of this whole update. But I use them differently now. If I write an entry and then immediately want to proofread it for clarity, fine. The basic editing functions catch typos and grammar stuff, and that’s genuinely useful. But I’ve stopped using the rewrite feature as a default step. Instead, I use it maybe once a month when I’m reviewing old entries and want to see if there’s a clearer way to express something I’ve already processed and understood.
The summarize function occasionally comes in handy when I’m writing something particularly long and tangled, and I’ll let it give me a distilled version just to check if my actual point is still buried somewhere in all those sentences. Usually, I decide I want to keep the messy version. The mess is where the thinking happens. Apple Intelligence Writing Tools are genuinely well-designed and they work as promised. The problem isn’t the tool. It’s that I was using it in a way that optimized for the wrong thing.
What Changed My Mind, and What That Means
I started this experiment believing that better writing tools automatically meant better journaling. I ended it understanding that journaling isn’t primarily about producing good writing. It’s about producing honest thinking, which is often clunky and repetitive and contradictory. Those qualities aren’t bugs in the process. They’re features.
None of this is meant as a criticism of the technology or of people using it differently than I am. Apple built something thoughtful here, and there’s a real case to be made that for some people, in some contexts, having AI help organize and clarify their thoughts is genuinely valuable. Some people in that Day One survey did feel the outputs were authentically personal. I’m just not one of them, and I think that’s okay. What matters more than the tool itself is being honest about whether it’s actually serving what you need it to serve.
Six months in, I’m using Apple’s Writing Tools maybe twice a week instead of with every entry. My journal is messier than it was during the honeymoon phase. It’s also more mine. If you’re thinking about trying this stuff out, go ahead and experiment. Notice what changes about your writing when the AI is handling certain tasks. Pay attention to whether you feel more connected to your own thinking or less. The tool won’t tell you what it’s doing to your process. Only you can figure that out. What’s been your experience with AI and writing? I’m curious whether my observations match what other people have noticed, or if I’m just learning this lesson from a particularly specific angle.