AI Writing Is a Dead End

Everyone is using AI, or so I hear. According to a viral Wired story, AI is so compelling that some men are even ignoring their wives and families so they can do things with AI, the same way a previous generation of men might have spent their leisure time obsessively tinkering with their cars. But at least everyone knows what a car is and what it does. I confess, I don’t understand what these guys are even doing with AI all the time. Is it “coding”? I still don’t really know what coding is and it’s probably too late to learn, since it seems like AI is doing all the coding now anyway. Are these guys making apps? Is that what all the fuss is about?

I use AI too. I wanted to see what all the fuss was about. I downloaded Claude because that’s the woke lib AI or whatever, and the logo is sitting on my MacBook dock — it’s surprisingly ugly, like someone threw a ball of white paint at a terracotta wall. Mostly I use Claude like a more intuitive, faster form of Google. If I know nothing about a topic, I can ask Claude a question and it will return some answers. The more specific the question, the less reliable the answer seems to be, which makes me suspicious about even the very general answers. In its defense, Claude is often a useful starting point for research, like Wikipedia; in both cases following the links to original sources is key. Claude is not infallible, but neither is Google, and now that Google’s search results are themselves being replaced by AI answers, Google is worse than ever before.

AI can also transcribe interviews very quickly and mostly pretty accurately. I’ve started using Claude to copyedit this newsletter, and it catches more mistakes than the last generation of spelling and grammar checkers. Ideally, all this work would be done by a human assistant and a human copyeditor, who could also sometimes write pieces and advance their careers. But I don’t have the money to pay those people. It’s just me doing this, sometimes late at night after the children have gone to sleep, and I appreciate Claude’s help.

I could go further in my use of AI. I could figure out, with probably minimal effort, how to get Claude to write this newsletter for me. I’d feed it a bunch of my past writing, then tell it, “OK, write something in the style of Harry Cheadle about that AI story that won the literary prize no one cared about until now. Remember to be cynical yet wistful, humanistic yet clear-eyed about the power of technology. Put some jokes in there.” Then I would take the compost can out, dump a day’s worth of food scraps into a dark, sour-smelling bin at the end of the driveway, and return to my computer to find a hunk of prose suitable for posting. Maybe I would edit it or go back and forth with Claude a bit to refine it, but it still wouldn’t take that long. I could do this every day, pump out piece after piece of “my” work, watch the likes and subscribes roll in.

Some writers do some version of this. Freelance journalists have been caught using AI to generate copy, some award-winning short stories have apparently been created with AI, and social media apps (including Substack) are full of text that has obviously been mashed out by machines. I suspect more and more writers, pressured to put out large amounts of work, will resort to AI tools, sometimes while making excuses about why it’s Actually Good they’re doing so. These short-sighted people deserve what will eventually happen to them.

Consider the genre fiction writers who self-publish on Amazon. According to a 2022 Verge story, these writers have to produce novels at an astonishing rate — one “allots herself precisely 49 days to write and self-edit a book” — to keep their fans satiated. They are not exceptional prose stylists; their readers apparently value quantity over quality. So naturally, many of them have turned to AI tools to speed their already speedy processes along. One AI writing teacher quoted in the Verge story encourages her students to think of AI as a technology like Google search or spellcheck. Authors don’t need to muck around coming up with descriptions of every setting their characters encounter, or managing every aspect of a scene; they can just provide outlines that nudge the AI in the right direction, then edit the results. “It’s less emotionally taxing. It’s less tiresome; it’s less fatiguing,” one author told the Verge. “I need to pay attention much less closely.”

Some months ago, a guy named Chad Rye got attention on Substack by defending his use of AI to write fantasy novels. He apparently writes detailed synopses of chapters and lets the AI fill in the gaps. According to him, it’s the only way he can produce the stories he wants to produce — he comes from a poor town in Florida, he doesn’t have much of an education, and he has four kids and a full-time job. “AI gave me a process that works with my life, my brain, my circumstances,” he wrote last year. “It let me finally become the writer I’d always wanted to be.”

There are countless versions of Rye scattered around the world, people who have visions for stories that they don’t have the time or the technical ability to actually create. That the stories living in Rye’s head seem like fairly boilerplate fantasy stuff shouldn’t diminish the joy he no doubt gets from putting them out into the world1. In the very near future, as AI gets even more powerful, I imagine it’ll be easy to create not just novels but TV shows and movies. The only restriction on what you can create will be the limits of your imagination.

The downside to this is that many people have in fact pretty limited imaginations. I suspect that AI will usher in a lot of content that boils down to, “What if everyone in Star Trek were having sex with each other?” This will be fun for the people who get the personal Horny Star Trek they’ve imagined since they were 13. Will other people want to watch that Horny Star Trek? Almost certainly not, since if they want bespoke AI slop they can just make their own. This is the trap of AI content: If you “make” things by feeding prompts into an AI agent and trying to use that content to build an audience, eventually your audience may decide that you are not a particularly important part of the process.

Writers love to be somewhat coy and mysterious about their “art,” but the economics of the profession are pretty simple. Through some combination of original reporting, research, and entertaining prose, writers create a product that has some monetary value — people will pay for it directly or advertisers are willing to pay for access to the audience. The test for AI writing isn’t about some measure of subjective quality but whether someone will pay for it. The more AI creeps into the process, the less likely it is that it’s worth anything. Just like I’m not going to pay for a bit of information that is easily found for free online, I’m not going to pay for prose that Claude can vomit out in five seconds.

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Way on the other side of the content universe, there’s someone out there who has been killing it at the B2B SaaS content game for years. His name is Joel. He knows from LinkedIn that AI tools are the future of his industry, and he is committed to learning all he can about AI for B2B SaaS content. He’s not going to be actually writing a lot of copy anymore, but that’s fine, he thinks — his “moat,” the skill that will keep his job from being devoured, is that he’s going to be so, so so good at using AI. Poor Joel. AI is getting better and better at B2B SaaS content every day, and it’s going to be easier and easier to use. As we speak, his boss is opening up ChatGPT2 and typing in “How can we automate Joel’s job?” and the AI is going, “Great question! Joel’s job is exactly the sort of thing a cost-conscious company can eliminate and replace with an AI — and a manager with an eye for detail.”3

Joel and AI-assisted “authors” have the same problem, which is that if your job is to produce large amounts of text, you have already lost. You can use AI to produce content faster than ever, but so can everyone else. You’re John Henry the steel-driving man competing against a machine, only you won’t be memorialized in a folk song because the machines write the songs now; if an AI composes a ballad about your struggle to out-slop Claude it will be to mock you for being an obsolete hunk of meat whose only use is to lay some bricks for a data center.

The good news is that as AI content takes over the internet, the human touch will become a luxury product. Some people, maybe most people, won’t care whether the videos and text they consume are “fake,” and may not even be able to define what “real” means. But others will continue to value human thought not because it’s more precise or interesting than machine thought but because it’s human. That is, you write to communicate with other people and you read because you want to learn what other people think. The thing you are paying for, when you subscribe to a newsletter, is not the output but the person behind it.

Imagine how possible it is to lead a frictionless existence. You can work remotely, your every personal and professional communication polished by an AI agent. You can learn about the world through AI summaries of the news. You can have your food delivered from grocery stores or restaurants either by drone or by gig worker who disappears as soon as they drop the packages at your door. You can entertain yourself endlessly from your couch, desk, and bed. If you go out to eat, you might order from a kiosk or QR code on the table and leave the restaurant without ever speaking to another person. If your dating app isn’t working out for you, you can boot up an AI romantic partner. Your children, if you somehow manage to have them, can be educated in part by AI-assisted technology. If this is your life, how badly will you need something human? And where will you get it from?

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