GoKawiilPeople who rarely produced original writing are suddenly producing extensive design proposals, business plans, documentation, presentations, tickets, pull requests, blog articles, and meeting summaries, all generated by AI. It is all unreadable. AI is helping me write better and faster, but I’m fed up with reading almost anything written by AI. In this essay, I want to express my frustration, and describe how I’m finding value in AI for writing.
AI Is Terrible for Writing
A pattern I see is that people use AI to build something new, then they use AI to retrospectively summarize what they have already built into a design document. Reading a document like this isn’t just difficult—it is punishing. The design document is no longer a proposal to build consensus, bring people along with you, and refine ideas through slow, deliberate thinking—it is a summary made by a machine, in exhausting detail, without context or perspective. It is unreadable. Inhumane. The authors of these documents become impatient when people aren’t engaged, and it is hard not to be, because the thing they built is already working.
I also see more and more pull request summaries clearly written by machines for machines. They are rich in detail: this was changed to that, these things were split, those things were merged, this was left untouched, tests were added for this, and so on. But I’m left asking: Why are we doing this? What is the value? How risky or urgent is this work? Where do you want my input? What should I pay attention to? The same goes for tickets or meeting summaries made by AI. The writing, like more and more of the world, consists of statements outside of context.
I had someone write me a personal message about a sensitive topic that was clearly workshopped with AI in an effort to nuance the conversation and not offend me. But the message became impersonal, dispassionate, and disjointed. It had all of the parts, but it didn’t make sense as a whole. I wasn’t interested in reading it, or responding. I would much rather someone be themselves and write with their own voice, or with some passion, even if they can’t quite find the words, or risk offending me.
In relationships with others, there is vulnerability and risk. In communicating with your AI, there is none, and attempts to eliminate vulnerability and risk will eliminate the process of relationship itself. As Simon Sarris writes in Resist Summary, an essay I keep returning to:
I think one should write as much as they can with their own empiricism, their own senses, giving the reader their own characterization of life or events.
—Simon Sarris, Resist Summary
Perhaps the laziest and most offensive use of AI writing I have seen: I had someone use AI to summarize my comments on their proposal as their response to me! Thanks! I couldn’t have said it better myself!
I Don’t Have the Context You Do
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