The three word sentences, the em-dashes, the pithy prose that everyone now has at their fingertips... As I scroll through my LinkedIn feed these days, I can't unsee it - the evidence of AI is everywhere. It's exciting, on one hand. And it's so powerful to witness at scale the ability now for everything to simply be "better" right out of the gate. Yet, I find myself distracted from what is arguably better content all over the place. Instead of consuming it with enjoyment, I end up hungry & hunting for evidence of the human inside of every post... are you in there? I'm using AI in so much of my day to day work and it has supercharged nearly everything. But for my more personal content, the 18 year old journalism major in me has decided - at least for now - to save the written word I fell in love with so many years ago, just for me... and that includes this post. My joy is found in the process itself. Now, that may mean you have to suffer through rogue ellipses here and there instead of an em-dash, but those are also the tiny idiosyncrasies that make us human. How are you handling that creative vs productive tension? What is the work that gives you joy... or is core to your personal identity that you have intentionally chosen not to use AI for just yet? ~100% Sarah 👋
Sarah - I love your inspiring post. Have I used AI? Yes. Did I feel happy producing something fast? Perhaps. Did I feel I have achieved something? Nope. Authoring, for me, is something I do to feel creative and have fun. It's like waking up your brain cells and taking them to the playground to get some air. On the other hand, AI produces more content to be ignored. If you compare content to food, we can even question are we producing fast food or junk food?
hi Sarah - thank you for this. I don't so much mind the grammatical ticks so much as the repetitive word constructs.. it is not this, it is that... I know that this is a hack to get to clarity but it does create a sense of the monotonic in too much of what I read. And when I see that AI has almost "singularly" written something - especially from a truly thoughtful person - I tend to ignore most of the piece, quite possibly from a mistrust that may not even be fully conscious. On the other hand, when someone who knows how to write actually partners with AI, their writing can be beautiful and persuasive. But THEY are the ones in control of the writing; AI is simply an enabler, a tool (or an assistant). I wonder if there can be more courses or how-to's for those who are less confident in their own writing and thus depend too heavily on AI? WIsh I had more time to respond here (and don't worry I didn't turn to Claude to accelerate my speed!) Carsten Stendevad
AI is what taught me I'd been misusing punctuation for years — turns out I needed em-dashes where I was throwing in commas and semicolons. Now I finally know the right way to write… and I can't use it without getting flagged as AI. I can't win.
I think we detect AI because it 'assembles' rather than writes. So it's empty. There is no point of view. No backstory. How can there be? AI isn't alive. It has no thoughts of its own. Humans write and think and each of us has a particular way of doing those things. Writing and thinking are uniquely human activities and they are entwined.
Sarah, I share many of your thoughts. But really the overarching one for me is concern that future generations will fully rely on AI to express their ideas. Not just rely on AI to refine their writing, but to write the majority of what they want to say. You have to believe that will hamper human development in a variety of ways, which isn’t good. But as they say, once the genie is out of the bottle… Obviously as a society we’re going to have to figure this out. Or we just give in and develop our writing skills around prompt engineering. Which sounds awful.
I’m finding there is something built into me that reads the first few sentences of a post, the staccato sentences, the rhyming and the framing ‘it’s not that it’s this’ and I turn off. I don’t read anymore. It’s not always even conscious. It’s a trigger of familiarity that I know I don’t enjoy, like the smell of an aeroplane, so I don’t read anymore. Like you, I use AI to speed up my research, but our words still need to be ours.
I will not use AI to communicate because communication is personal, it is unique, it is human. If it isn't mine, then was it is? Just meaningless, computer-generated noise, no matter how seemingly eloquent and "well structured".
Your post struck a chord with me. AI came with the promise of democratizing previously specialized skills like writing and coding. But in both cases, we're seeing soulless slop that denigrates the craft. I'm concerned about what it's doing to our ability to think. I lean on writing as a form of thinking, but AI has made it so easy to abdicate that responsibility. Personally, I'm struggling to reason critically in a way I once could. Storytelling is core to my identity and gives me joy. Thanks for the reminder to own it.
Totally agree and this is so clearly a human post; it’s refreshing! I do mourn being able to write with an em-dash without it being seen as AI. I’m gratefull for my journalism classes that taught me the power and precision of words.