Hand-crafted, artisan writing

4 years ago I never would have expected to be fooled even once by writing or media created by AI.

Lately I have been more motivated than ever to do all my writing by hand. It's been a few years since college when I was doing any kind of serious academic writing, so for me this means avoiding any LLM assistance in technical writing, communication (i.e. PR descriptions, slack, email), and even documentation. This feeling has been compounded by the onslaught of slop that I sift through daily. Twitter, LinkedIn, any social media I consume really contains such a high degree of slop in the form of AI generated articles, comments, even photos and videos that are just barely distinguishable from real ones. It is exhausting to be on high alert.

I've read a few other very well done articles on this topic that I encourage everyone to read who feels the same:

I'm Tired of Talking to AI - Orchid Files

I’m tired of talking to AI. I want to talk to real people. But even when I talk to people, they forward my questions to AI and send me the AI’s answer.

The Social Contract of Writing - Johanna Larsson

The ability to write original content, without LLMs, will just become more valuable as the generated content takes over more and more of the internet.

I’m going to try to make this more of a routine thing now. It feels meaningful. Worth doing.

Don't be a meat proxy - Niklas Gruhn

By all means, prompt AI. But don't just relay the output. Read it, understand it, validate it, and then write a response in your own words (a decent certificate that you've done the prior steps). Making that effort is value you can add.

There are a couple main points here that emerge that I agree with.

The first is that it forces you to think. My dad shared with me a quote from Joan Didion:

I don't know what I think until I write it down.

Lately I've been guilty of offloading a growing chunk of my technical thinking to AI and I find myself increasingly reaching for it in other areas of life. Writing can be a great way to challenge yourself, to organize your thoughts that may be scattered into something organized and concrete. I was lucky enough to get through my entire education (K-12 and college) before there was any AI to help. I like to think that I would have done all the hard work still if AI was an option, but I seriously doubt it. How many shortcuts in critical thinking would I have taken and how would it affect who I've become today? I will never know the answer, but one thing that I'm convinced of is that writing will continue to be a fantastic way to keep critical thinking sharp.

Another is that there will certainly be a premium on well done, original writing. We've already seen this with the latest news on Anthropic's controversial Rare Books Department, relentlessly purchasing, scanning, and destroying rare books in order to gain a competitive advantage by training on material other companies models won't see. Aside from the pure economic demand for it, human beings in general crave quality writing and expression from their own times. We will always have the classics, but new themes, events, and societal constructs will always require humans to express and connect with others through writing in new ways. Both those who write quality posts and those who communicate daily through solid writing will gain an edge in many aspects of life.

My last takeaway is how it affects others around you. I'm not the only one exhausted by being constantly looking for signs something that was sent to me was AI. A brilliant technical writer recently who has used em dashes in his past work agreed when I suggested we strike them out from a blog post, to ensure people didn't think it was AI. The pattern of "it's not this, it's that" that AI constantly weaves into writing makes my eyes glaze over. It undermines your own credibility when sharing it and fatigues and annoys those who receive it.

As Johanna Larsson mentioned in her post, writing is certainly changed forever. The frequencies of words used in papers and in spoken word will change and infiltrate even modern human communication. Em dashes and "you're absolutely right" may now always feel like AI slop and be intentionally avoided, even though they were once completely valid. Time will tell what happens. For now, she has inspired me to want to keep working on and improving my writing.

I won't, however, be returning to writing hand-crafted, artisan code anytime soon. We'll need another post for that.

Thanks for reading.