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I think this is a fantastic and important essay, but I think it applies equally well to science. When you get to graduate school the mission isn't to reproduce what is in the book, it is to go beyond the book and that takes more than rearranging different parts of different existing books.

Even if you WEREN'T as good as its output. You would never BECOME better without doing the work of understanding what is better and why.

My long ago decision to write bad on purpose remains extensively vindicated!

A company rep pitched their AI as so helpful for 'writing all their communications.' I tersely said "I would never do that - my voice is my own. When I have to research and write it, I know more." My work peer agreed: I - we - all lose when a machine writes for us.

That's good to hear! Homework has always been problematic with big disparities amongst students along class lines in terms of access to quiet spaces and amount of time outside of work. I'd also give feedback in real time so they can improve, the methods we use with young kids with with all as ages.

I’ve been to 5 high school graduations in the last 3 years and every valedictorian’s speech was perfectly normal. But I can’t remember an anecdote from any.

Given the way AI companies are burning through cash, I expect either the AI companies will go bankrupt or the price of using the AI will skyrocket. Either way, people who have learned to write without AI assistance will have a huge advantage.

llms can do a lot of things well, but they do not and will never be able to do emotion well.

I am certain that AI will eventually homogenize all of its results. Especially if the web sites they steal from block them or go dark. Everyone will turn in the same reports.

Christopher Kubasik in 1992 in the book Changeling coined the word "iconerate" > just functionally literate, or 'iconerate,' the new term for those who went through life using only symbols and key words for written communication www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/...

Also I wish people would try to understand information theory. If you put Prompt A into an LLM and get Text A', A' *doesn't have more real information.* You might as well just communicate A itself. The machine *cannot know more about what you mean* than you do.

I once had a boss (different company) who glanced at a draft I'd produced about a subject that was key to the business. He set it aside and told me that no one was going to read it. I knew that his own thinking (and writing) was comically sloppy, and that moment told me why. He refused to read.

I train myself for those times, but it is surviving until the bubble pops....

Sounds like the author of that piece has become more of a counsellor for his students. Is this what some authors actually need? Is this what writers groups are actually providing? Not technical know-how, but emotional support to bring out what the author wants to say?

I told my hubby today that if I were told to use AI at work, I’d probably put in my two-week notice

I really like what JMS just wrote on AI and storytelling! jmichaelstraczynski.substack.com/p/silence-wh...

Can't wrap my head around the appeal of writing with AI. Its googling similar books and copy-pasting. no challenge or problem solving. same with AI coding. the fun is the puzzle! the eureka moment, feeling like a goddamn wizard deciphering spell books! ppl have forgotten the point of being alive

I submit that, if you can't write without AI, you can't write.

Just like being able to do maths without a calculator. That's got to be so competitive.

I get that totally. Just thought spending that much time on video game mastery maybe isn’t healthy. Then again maybe I’m just old and don’t get the modern world!

He needs to find a better circle of writers to move with.

I know the story well. It’s been repacked over the years for various techs. The first time I saw it was in college, in the 80’s, about calculators. There were people using slide rules that felt calculators made people stupid. Again for publishing on the web. And for smart phones. And likely more.

I get it. I’m a highly skilled, unemployed software engineer.

Speaking as a former copy editor myself, Grammarly ain't shit. It gets things wrong ALL THE TIME, because it doesn't understand intent and can't recognize when an author is bending or breaking conventions for effect—or doing something correctly but atypically.

The tech industry was already borderline post-literate and this might be presaging what's going to happen to society at large.

Do people actually read it? My experience is that AI stuff is really wordy and people were already only really reading about 10% of anything

here's hoping.

As with all endeavors of passion, if carried on long enough, one comes to discover the path to be more important than the “end.”

Thank you for saying that.

This very thought sustains me. The act of writing is precious. Even though I’m rarely satisfied with the result and have so much to learn, all my joy in it comes from learning to speak, in small friction-filled increments over time, in my own voice on the page. Joy will preserve a writer’s soul.

Same goes for software developers, speaking as one

I won't read it at all, if its AI written. I hate it.

This is honestly one of the things that keeps me going in this Age of Slop. Even if the worst happens, my writing will still be my voice alone and will be distinct because of it.

My kid is on her school’s Honor Council. Her critique of her peers’ use of AI: “AI writing is just so *mid.* You go to a prestigious high school! Show some self-respect.” Also, college admissions officers keep telling us that AI-written applications just plain suck. They’re anti-appealing.

May you be right. For now, bosses are quite happy with slop that is boring, generic and wrong, as long as it's cheap. I hope they come to their senses (or get yeeted into Jupiter and replaced by people who know what they're doing) within my lifetime.

There are insights here for teachers of writing, too, about valuing the struggle of authentic natural writing. Handing back work scratched up with corrections w/o acknowledging the idea, intent and effort is kind of like letting AI do the grading; responding only to the result, ignoring the attempt.

People will either forget how to write or never learn. It’s a trap. Tech Bros are not your friends.

yes, shame on the system that made them so afraid to open up and take risks.

The only way to improve is by identifying the ways in which you're not perfect, and then getting a little better until eventually you never actually become perfect because you're a human being.

The thirst for being *normal* is a curse. The idea that we can be enough so long as we are enough for others leads us astray. We *are* enough. It is enough to be becoming.

As a former anxiety-ridden, High Achiever teenager, I feel this deeply

pedagogy about learning to learn was strangled to death a long time ago there is only Utility

Lotta mfers out there grasping when they could be reaching.

“what a competitive advantage being able to [literally anything] without AI will be”

To be fair, the students in the article probably weren't particularly looking to have a competitive advantage in their function writing.

Sorta like having been being taught to read by phonetics and knowing how to parse a sentence is now.

I just don't understand the appeal. My self-published book sold like shit but I'll always being proud to have written it. When their slop also sells like shit, what will they have?

Thank you John. Even in the age of email, then texting there are obvious signs of those who really know how to write well. Human brains can do amazing things when properly sharpened & repeatedly honed to a smooth finished edge.

Tbh, what's the point of writing with ai imo? All of it's just slop and I'll never understand it

Yuuuup. I like absurdly long longfics, but things need to *happen*, or at *least* it needs to go into ridiculous detail about trees in a way where I'm actually learning things about trees

And so, so many metaphors that sound superficially deep but you look at them again and go "wait what" and "why is that hum sharp" and "this hockey player would not fucking think that"

To be fair, that was the sort of writing that was encouraged when I was in school and I hated writing like that. It was boring. I actually had to redo my senior project because it scored so poorly. Now sounding like a human and not a robot is considered a good thing and it drives me crazy.

Write in cursive if you don’t want kids to understand you. Sad, but true. Penmanship is becoming a lost art.

I feel like this is said often but it's not so much the writing -- it's the thinking. Nothing forces thinking ideas through like writing does.

As a teen I did not want to learn about indie rock. I just wanted to have the trappings and talk to literally anyone because I was desperate for culture but uninformed about what it was I was craving. I am now an adult and I still crave connection but now I actually care about people instead.

Replace ‘write’ with any number of skilled occupations and that sentence stays valid (In my occupation the LLMs do serve a useful function, in that there’s an inverse relation between the amount of blathering about them, and competence)

I enrolled in college screenwriting courses and wrote down terrible scripts. Ultimately, it made me force to have better tastes and a better working method. Cringe is something than nothing

Opening all future interviews with "So for starters, I can use my own brain to do stuff"

And not just fiction writers

Competence is underrated.

Exactly.

Great essay. I spent the better part of four decades as a reporter, editor and bureau chief for newspapers and a wire service. I could write on deadline like a master, but doing fiction confounded me the few times I tried it. I have a tremendous admiration for those who write fiction; using AI? 👎👎

Those of us who learned to write in the 1900's have a distinct advantage.

@scott.hanselman.com made one of my favorite analogies the other day comparing it to weight lifting on rails vs free weights, you don't exercise every muscle with a rail, free weights help get all those little muscles as well as the main ones.

When I did project planning decades back, the instruction was that it was critical to have the plan written down and communicated--but know the plan will not roll out as planned, so do not be tied to the plan, the real value was knowledge gained in process of making plan--so it is with writing, no?

i'm banking on it, man. also real research, analysis, and synthesis. machines will never be able to do nuance like a human brain.

i am feeling more convinced that writing or invitations to thought as we have designed them can’t adhere to the old pace of the semester. I think the kind of process-based/-dependent tasks that i, in education, value in teacher development, might require more in-person time engaged in process.

Same with designers Design is a process not (just) an output. Critical thinking during the process is essential. Unless you just want to design 'cool' things you're badly copying. AI is fine at badly copying what people might think are 'cool' things. In which case, yes - you're career is at risk

Similar to knowing what it's like to grow up without a cell phone

My kid is a senior and decided to major in communications at college in Boston in the fall. One of her high school teachers told the class that any degree not STEM-related will be meaningless because of AI. She briefly panicked before she remembered he was an idiot and AI “writing” sucks.

in my best Billy Joel impression "welcome back to the age of scribes"