I’ve found myself using AI less and less for writing. It struck me that written prose is simultaneously the most used and the least impressive application of AI today.
For me, writing is a way to process and develop my thoughts. The very purpose of writing is to clarify my thoughts in the same way that the purpose of going to the gym is to strengthen my muscles and encourage me to exercise.
Aside from that, I feel dishonest and almost ashamed to expect a reader to read anything with my name on it that was not written or edited by me.
No one will notice
We are unfortunately swamped with AI slop on all channels and in all platforms, including the physical world. Cafe menus, charity posters, and naff product packaging are not immune to the AI slop disease.
I’m not an AI hater, though. AI has enabled me to create more and better software than I would have dreamt possible just a few years ago.
I’ve benefited from countless new features, products, and services that simply would not exist without AI and agentic coding.
And as much as it kills me to admit it, AI has even started to get pretty good at some design tasks like icon creation and user interfaces.
There are also huge steps forward in voice (both text-to-speech and dictation), as well as video creation and editing.
Writing: where it all started
However, this whole AI era started with OpenAI launching ChatGPT. An incredible chat experience that purely operates with text.
So why is it that now, with the ability to create entire apps, movies, and images, written text is still so obviously… inhuman? Surely written prose should be better than anything by now, given its had the longest to develop.
No matter how hard I try, no matter how much context I give it, no matter which model I use, I cannot get AI to create an article or a post that I would want to actually read. I always need to make changes.
The whiff of AI
The more you use any of these tools the more you can so easily spot AI usage.
Let’s leave the em dash out of it. I have always used and loved the em dash so I refuse to drop it. Regardless of whether that makes the reader think I’ve prompted my way to everything I write.
But the written tells that really stand out to me: the “it’s not this, it’s that”, the word “quietly”, and the oddly specific mention of a day and time in the week “this feature is what saves you when you forget to take the dog out on a Thursday morning”.
Aside from those tells though, it’s the sense of dishonesty, and lack of authenticity, and lack of human judgement.
It’s the hope, or even assumption, that the reader won’t notice and won’t care.
It just stinks to me. And this reader, for one, does notice, and does care.