On Being a Write

Thinking about the practice of writing in the age of intelligent machines

My friend Alex recently sent me Paul Graham’s new essay “Writes and Write-Nots”. Like most Graham essays, it is short and to the point. The theme can be broken down into four parts:

 (1) writing is hard

 (2) writing is hard because it requires clear thinking – you cannot write what you do not know, 

(3) because it is hard, and because it is easily replaced by large language models, many people will stop doing it

(4) this is bad, because it will lead people to be less careful in their thinking.

I think about this endlessly and see its effects everywhere. Slop is on the rise, most obviously on social media and in low end news outlets, but also in promotional materials, concept papers, and internal memos.

 If you work in the knowledge economy, you probably read something first drafted by an LLM this month, you just may not have noticed.

“I have the LLM do the first draft and then I edit it” is something I hear often. This is better, obviously, than just posting the slop fresh off the language model. But it minimizes what I think is the most important part of writing, and what Graham is getting at in his essay.  Writing, starting with nothing and trying to turn abstract ill-formed ideas into words on a page another human can understand, is what clarifies your thoughts. In some way, it’s what creates the thought.* As we cede more and more of writing to the machines, some of us will loose our ability to do that, and with it the sharpness of our reasoning. That’ll be a loss, but (I’m hoping at least) the world will reward those of us who write because we enjoy the process, that’s the plan at least.  

I’ll leave this with a bit of my conservation with Alex after he sent the article:

Me: “I wonder how this plays our in high performance workplaces that have a “writing culture” like Amazon and Stripe which value the well crafted memo. Will people start faking the writing culture? Will others be able to tell?”

Alex: “I think if people fake it, it will have terrible repercussions for them because it will be clear that they don’t really understand what their memo says.” 

As a wordcel, I hope you’re right, Alex. Hope you’re right.

*Query whether it degrades the value of this that LLMs are so good at this.