Public Service Announcement: Don't Say You Use AI for Writing

I think the argument is misguided, even if I agree with the principle: it is based in the effort one puts in and how it's similar to a sport.

I don't care whether my favorite author sweated for months facing a typewriter, of he effortlessly dictated the final form of the book in one sitting to a secretary while sipping mojitos.

I think my issue with AI has more to do with the signal it sends: reading takes effort, particularly literature, and I use the author's name as a proxy to judge whether to invest that effort myself. Nothing bad in selling dollar store crap, but it's bad to put 'Nike' on it.

Your individuality is what you sell as an author. I can get access to the LLM without you.

The problem lies with people trying to claim credit without doing the work: writing. AI is a fantastic tool that catches flow errors, grammar problems and punctuation misuse, just like a copywriter. But copywriters don't get bylines.

My line is clear, if you use copy paste the AI output that's not your writing. I am okay with AI collaboration - it detects the errors, you decide what to do with them.

When I write something heavily edited by AI - I mention that I use AI assistance (not AI led thinking). I will probably remove that because the perception is quite different. Its like applying one applying to an engineering job but write "a pychic, a medium" in a corner of their resume.

It is very common to see that any interesting thought gets immediately tagged like AI slop and the real AI slop wins. Try an A/B test and you shall see that AI actually wins because of the people who hate AI. Most people cannot distinguish between a human and a AI written post and yet those same people want to be judgemental. And the people who are against AI and say "its just the next token generator and I don't use it" and yet use autocomplete on their mobiles are just duplicit. And yes AI is the next-token-generator, we have no proof that most humans were not brainwashed to become the same.

AI could have helped the author write what he's trying to say in one three word sentence: don't use AI.

Because in his view, if you use AI and don't disclose it, you're a liar. And if you use AI and disclose it, he won't trust you anyway.