Peak Distaste

I do think we’ve reached Peak Distaste for AI Writing.

A few notes:

+ Every action has a reaction

Yes, some people are starting to think (and talk) like their AIs.

But there's also a healthy counter: some writers who are well versed in AI jargon are doing everything they can to be demonstrably 𝘩𝘶𝘮𝘢𝘯. More personal, more ideosyncratic, more creative. More weird. And this is great!

+ AI raises the floor, and redesigns the ceiling

Claude and GPT can help mediocre writers produce less-mediocre blog posts, at scale. (This is great for some people’s productivity, and net bad for the internet.)

What I’m more excited about is how it helps exceptional writers organize their research, interrogate structure and bring in unexpected sources and examples. (Dan Koe does this well, among others.)

+ "It's not X, it's Y"

It doesn’t matter how many times I tell Claude to avoid this structure… it never goes away. I call these phrases “performative binaries”. They’re not just annoying — they eat away at my soul :)

LLMs are disambiguation engines. Every token is the resolution of competing probabilities. So, what if this structure is actually the language of AI itself? (If it's not a 0, it has to be a 1.) At the very least, this helps me reframe my frustration. The counter move here for human writers is to sit in the gray zone between two poles even when it gets uncomfortable.

+ Letting AI be AI.

I’ve spent the better part of a year working to get my Claude to write like me.
This has been at times fun and useful, but I’ve come back around to rawdog-ing English composition, and I’m much happier for it.

I wonder: instead of forcing our AI’s to be something they’re not, what if we let them become the fullest expression of themselves? My sense is that trying to get Claude to write well is like hiring a consultant to be your best friend: interesting for a few hours, then awkwardly ineffective. If you really want to 𝘸𝘳𝘪𝘵𝘦, and you’re not writing to check a box at work, shouldn’t you want to hold the pen in your imperfect, fragile, bloody human hand?