The mental-model that I am using for online writing, is that it is analogous to the spectrum of `pretending <-> acting`. The worst writing (AI or otherwise), looks, sounds, feels like pretense, like a kid that tucks a towel into his shirt, and runs around, pretending to be a super-hero. Meanwhile, acting, true acting, is invisible, it is a synonym for _being_[1].

That said, a lot of the AI writing feels "procedural", in the sense that most corporate writing (whitepapers, press releases, etc) feel procedural (i.e. the result of a constructed procedure). Before AI, the constructed procedure was basically that a piece of writing passes through a bunch of people (e.g. engineering -> management -> marketing -> website/email), and the output is a bland, forgettable pablum designed to (1) be SEO-friendly, (2) be spam-filter friendly, (3) be easy to ingest, (4) look superficially trustworthy and authoritative (e.g. inflated page count, extra jargon, numbers, plots), (5) look like it belongs to the "scene" or "industry" by imitating all the other corporate writings out there[2].

AI is interesting, in the same way that computers or the internet or an encyclopedia are interesting: how people choose to use it tells you a lot about them. All of those technologies can be used to compensate for a lack of skill (it helps one pretend), or they can be used to forge a skill (it helps one become).

One has to pretend, before they can act (I guess? Feels intuitively correct to me). So perhaps, AI (and web, and computer, and encyclopedia) is only harmful to the extend that it does not nudge a person towards becoming[3]? And if so, that's a _cultural_ limitation, not a technological one.

[1]: I am not an actor, and so I might be wrong, but that is the impression I get from just watching and analyzing the acting in various films.

[2]: this becomes frustrating when you get criticized for producing something that "reads like $famousSomething", and then you get criticized again for producing something that "does not read like $typeOfFamousSomething".

[3]: No clue how you (plural -- let's bring back "yous") will convince your boss that you did not take the shortcut, because you were trying to "become more".