My Post-Ai Writing

one thing I’ve learned about myself from receiving endless suggestions from people to have AI do my writing for me is that I write to write, more than I write to produce writing

The robot was quite good at copying my style, but much less good at writing anything meaningful. It could predict which words I would be most likely to use but it couldn’t make an original argument for me. Using the robot made me think a lot about the nature of writing and what goes in to its peculiar form of labor. AI tools fundamentally promise t... See more

In this analogy, LLMs become better than humans at writing. But it’s still widely understood that learning to write is good for you (maybe writing is “the best way to think”) so people send their kids to writing camp and humble-brag about writing in their free time. But in the end, most writing was done for the mundane purpose of  making text

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