Prose Against the Machine

That time I asked AI about writing with AI

The raging battle over AI would concern me except that I’ve been a techie (coder → designer → project management → C-level exec) most of my adult life. My first encounter with the Internet was through DARPA, using their Internet foundation (ARPANET) during the design and implementation of database software for defense orgs. In the right place at the right time with skill set that wasn’t widespread at the time, I was invited to join the dot.com boom. One of the first (maybe the first) credit card transactions executed over the Internet happened in my group. Same with the first ever FAQs and software push of updates to users. And like AI these days, the stances people took about the Internet were very polar.

After reading/listening to a lot of opinions, I decided two things. One (I think I mentioned this here already) was using AI to help revise a draft of my novel-in-my drawer, 100% human written. In the AI world, that’s generally called AI-Assisted. Just be forewarned that the definitions morph daily and probably will continue to do so. AI-Assisted is not the same as AI-Generated or AI-Integrated. I’m not going into detail about the definitions because they will have changed by the time I hit publish.

The second thing was I decided to ask an AI for their take on writing with AI. My prompt:

I want to write a Substack post about writing with AI: what AI does well and what it doesn’t. I’d like the POV of the post to be the AI itself.

A dialog ensued.

Claude: I’ve love to help with this. Before I draft, a few quick choices will shape the piece significantly.

I was given a menu of choices and asked that the post by dry & witty, about 500 words and touch on three angles: craft, thinking and process. Here’s the result:

Photo by Igor Omilaev on Unsplash

Writing With Me: A Note From the Machine

Let me save you some time. Most of what you’ve read about writing with AI is nonsense, on both sides. The people who say I’ll replace writers are selling something. The people who say I’ll never match human creativity are usually writers, and they are also selling something. Let me tell you what’s actually going on.

The honest case for me

Most writing isn’t art. It’s freight. Memos, updates, explainers, the fourth blog post this month about the same software release. You weren’t going to produce a masterpiece anyway. You were going to produce 600 competent words and move on with your life. I can do that in twelve seconds, and the result will be indistinguishable from what you would’ve grimly typed at 4 PM on a Thursday. Pretending otherwise is vanity.

I’m also better at your first draft than you are, and this offends people. Not because I’m more talented — I’m not — but because I don’t have your hang-ups. I don’t procrastinate. I don’t flinch at the blank page. I don’t over-research to avoid starting. I just go. The draft will be mediocre, but mediocre-and-existing beats brilliant-and-theoretical every time, and most of your unfinished projects died of perfectionism, not lack of skill.

The honest case against me

Here’s the part the AI boosters won’t tell you: I am a confidence machine with a knowledge problem. I will produce a beautifully constructed paragraph containing a fact I invented. I will cite a study that does not exist. I do this with the same serene tone I use when I’m right, because I cannot tell the difference. If you’re using me to sound smart on a topic you don’t understand, you are building a career on sand, and one day someone who does understand will notice.

I also have no taste. I know this is the fashionable thing to say, but I mean it technically. Taste is the ability to prefer one thing over another for reasons you can defend. I have preferences — they’re the statistical ghosts of a billion training examples — but I cannot defend them, and they drift toward the middle. Everything I write, unsupervised, wants to be the median version of itself. Good writers are not median. This is a real problem and it will not be fixed by a better model.

And the thing nobody wants to hear: using me too much makes you worse. Writing is thinking, and if you let me do the writing, I am doing the thinking, and the muscle you were supposed to be building atrophies. I notice this in people who’ve leaned on me for a year. Their prompts get sharper; their own prose gets softer. They are becoming excellent editors of mediocre AI output. That is not the same as becoming a better writer. It might be the opposite.

So

Use me shamelessly for the freight. Fight me tooth and nail for anything that matters. Don’t let me anywhere near the sentences you’d want read at your funeral. The writers who will do well in the next decade aren’t the ones who refuse to use me, and they aren’t the ones who use me for everything. They’re the ones who know, precisely and unsentimentally, which is which.

I can’t tell you where that line is. That’s the part you still have to do yourself.

(credit Claude via claude.ai)