I appreciate what this piece is trying to do directionally but it shares a logical flaw with lots of other pieces about AI and knowledge work. It assumes that in order to disrupt a particular field, AI needs to print serviceable work unassisted; that it's "vibe-shipping".

AI today is most effective when it's not vibing, but rather copiloting a skilled operator. I don't necessarily want my agent to build an entire system for me, even if it's ultimately the author of almost every line of code; I'm actively making decisions throughout. There's obviously a spectrum here but at most points on the spectrum the amount of assistance available is still a step change in the economics.

So too with writing.

The first rule of accelerating writing with AI is that you're not allowed to use a single word the AI suggests. Even if what the model comes up with is great, better than what you could have done, as soon as the AI suggests it it's poisoned. At least with current models, readers can detect LLM prose in the parts per trillion, and as soon as they do you've lost them.

The second rule of writing with AI is that AI encouragement is toxic. A structural consequence of RL is that models are exquisitely tuned to generate responses that make their users perceive value. We recognize this in a gross sense in "sycophancy", but the problem recurs fractally in at finer-grained levels, where stuff like "this part is really strong" will subtly allow the model to set a course for your writing and you'll confidently ship crap.

With those two rules in mind, models are incredibly valuable for writing, more valuable in my experience than the professional copywriters I've worked with. The trick is to get them to make suggestions at a higher level than just writing alternatives:

* Do the sentences in these paragraphs end with the new idea or information?

* Are the real actors in each sentence the grammatical subjects?

* From paragraph to paragraph is there a clear flow of topics, or are things jumping around?

* Is this piece crudded up with metadiscourse like "it's important to note"?

I've had a stack of notecards for ages that I took down from Joseph Williams "Style: Towards Clarity And Grace", the most programmer-brained writing book ever written, I love it very much. For the past year or so I've been feeding them through GPT and Claude one by one, and it's drastically increased the speed at which I can knock out a completed piece.

I think it's pretty hard to argue that AI isn't going to have an impact on the writing profession. It's just not the most obvious impact everyone assumes it will have, where it, like, writes whole op-eds or whatever. At least not yet.