On AI writing

I love the closing artwork. It's really on theme.

I agree with the author. Content marketers, journalists and other professional writers are very good at making content sound engaging without losing the "voice" of their clients. Tech writers are generally good at presenting complex topics in very accessible ways. They develop style guides that make this easier to do at scale, and editors who are usually better at reading and tweaking over writing from scratch help put everything together.

AI is certainly able to ingest all of that and create similar work, but doing so requires A LOT of hand-holding. Without that, LLMs bias towards writing like a cross between an exec assistant who just started using Grammarly and a junior beat journalist trying to prove something no matter the framing.

Most people don't do that, mostly because writing is a means to an end for many; thus, I've seen the three-banger punchline style in academic works and Claude's EXTREMELY tired "we have Axios at home" headlines in mediums you'd never usually see them in.

What usually does me in is that LLMs take FOREVER to get their "point" across. Whiz-bang gotcha prose only works if you don't spend five paragraphs telling me something that could have gotten distilled into a two-sentence blurb.

What's worse is that summarizing with AI is really popular but doing so usually leaves out important details, and you never know exactly what unless you skim through the piece. When that piece is AI-generated, as they are increasingly becoming...yeah.

> When you know the writer personally, it becomes harder to see the text from the author’s perspective if you know it’s not her style.

I think this is why I absolutely hate reading AI-generated PR descriptions, Readmes or wiki entries at work. I work with these people every day, we talk to each other in meetings, but then I read perfectly formatted Slop in the freshly opened PR that has your name and picture attached to it, yet it's almost impossible for me to care about it because (subconsciously or not) i can't bring myself to see it as yours. Same or even worse for reviews.

I just wish AI was brief.

Don’t add filler words. Be straight to the point.

The painting at the bottom of the post is actually a really good representation of what is lost with readers and writers both using AI.

I think the signal to noise ratio is high in good writing. Just like in this article and it is very well written. I enjoyed it.

Interesting perspectives, a couple of questions that I've been pondering, and am currently curious of your perspectives on

1. It seems we are starting to see more people write like ai, is this something you have measured yet? (I never used em-dash (big fan of the parens), and I resisted for a while, re: ai, but now am trying to use them appropriately)

2. I've been reading from paper again, and my own writing style is evolving, is this too something you can/have measured?

I've been involved in generating AI fiction / researching AI fiction for a long time now. Both in creating text editors to support it (https://github.com/darrylschaefer/fthr) and in making pipelines to generate it procedurally. I'm also a writer and have practiced both commercial and literary writing, so this isn't something that I've been trying to do purely for money. I have a lot of personal interest in it and have put a lot of time into trying to make interesting things here.

My thoughts on "AI writing" is that the fears around it seem overblown. The frontier models seem to be getting worse, if anything. If one were to make fine-tunes with a specific style, well, that's also a lot of work just to write in a style. How many books in that style can one sell to justify the training? I don't know if the numbers ever add up.

The entire thing might be a great thing for writing and eventually lead to a revival, because now readers will have a motivation to understand the human behind the piece which is always the most interesting part.

We have Ai that can solve any math problem or any technical problem. But we don't have AI that can write naturally like a human. Turns out the purest human intelligence is something no Ai could ever reach. We invented in the past century things like measuring intelligence with iq tests only to realise what kind of bullshit this idea turns out to be in 2026. Turns out we had the wrong mental model of what constitutes intelligence and built machines with super intelligence only in a very narrow sense of the term. We need to radically redefine our idea what human intelligence is.

> Personally, I feel that I am at least a third slower reading AI-generated text, even if the length is the same.

I've been reading an AI-generated technical proposition. It was even slower for me.

> Beyond this, most models are extremely verbose, which makes total reading time much higher.

Painfully true. When I took a semster of law studies and got my first homework assignment, I was flabbergasted by how short the submission length limits were. I could barely write an introduction to my mini-paper with that number of pages! And I was expecteds to cover everything, and have an explicit conclusion, and a complete and meticulous bibliography. I struggled sooo much to be more concise and to let go of less-critical points I wanted to make! But it was a great intellectual and rhetorical exercise.

It is interesting how despite huge and rapid advances in coding or math, AI still sucks at writing and is (mostly) obvious, at least if people are trying to pay attention. it cannot fool pangram, even though it's not clear exactly what it flags as being AI. Maybe one day AI will close the gap.

Claude resay that as if I was a mentally challenged child (but without your dumb metaphors) using as few words as possible in your best imitation of a Human speaking casually without jargon and ...

(What it feels like to try and get a decent sentence out of my AI.)

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