Against Email Slop
Everything Good Takes Work
My usage of the AI models is changing quickly.
When GPT3 dropped, I was shocked and convinced the world had changed. I began using it for everything. Personally at first as a supped up google, then to illustrate this blog, then to help edit it, while also having it develop complex spreadsheets to track my physical, financial, and intellectual goals. My uses at work also accelerated from summarizing articles, to developing presentations, to using it to complete complex tasks.
But I’ve found that while my usage of the tools has gone up, professionally, my desire to use them creatively has gone down. The aesthetics of the AI image quickly became trite and crass. Soon after I began illustrating with it, I stopped. It seemed trashy. The ease with which the image could be produced deteriorated the impact.
Everything good takes work.
The same goes for writing. The tools are excellent editors (and better than no editor at all), but overuse of them will flatten your writing. Even worse, using them to draft for you will flatten (or erase) your ability to think. Just like AI generated illustrations, the ease of production IS the problem. I now routinely get work emails I can immediately tell were drafted by co-pilot. Too often when I probe the person in the “from” line about what the email meant, I get less than satisfactory answers. Why? Because the supposed writer isn’t doing the thinking. They haven’t fussed over the language enough to understand what they are really trying to say, and what you end up with is email slop.
It’s all happening so fast. We went from no one using the models to everyone using them for everything in record time. As a friend said to me this morning “having AI draft your emails is going to be a cultural faux pas in like two weeks”.
A mere 9 months ago, I talked about putting the posts here through multiple rounds with an LLM. Now, I do far less. I check for grammar and syntax, but leave my arguments inadequately formed and human.
The models are extraordinary. Use them, but resist the siren song of having them do your thinking for you.
As I have said since the beginning, if it is a piece of writing you care about, you need to do the first draft from your poor little normal ass brain. If you don’t, you will never fully understand what you are claiming as your own thoughts.
The future belongs to the weird. The big models will make you less weird. Resist that.