A few days ago this post hit twitter and did numbers:
This comes on the heels of another tweet that went: “I’m basically a condom for Claude”. These sentiments are increasing and resonating. It doesn’t have to be this way.
- Don’t burden people with long documents that you didn’t write or at least thoroughly curate yourself. This is rude! The writing is verbose, unpleasant, and frequently incoherent. If you didn’t care enough to write it, why should anyone read it?
- Keep your one-and-only human spirit. Don’t outsource your thinking and writing to the borg. You may as well be illiterate. You may as well be one of these people:
As a matter of principle I rarely let AI write prose for me aside from cases where the output is pure utility, like code, a status update, a commit message. Nothing I write on this blog will be written by AI.
A better way
How do you avoid becoming a blob-person? For anything that isn’t a rote task, use AI as a teacher and creative partner. Make it challenge your thinking, rather than letting it think for you. Fable (from Claude) is wildly good at critiquing prose. I used it to help me with an important letter, with the prompt being something along these lines:
“Sharply critique this letter. Give me advice on how to improve it, do not give me examples.”
It was like having an arrogant, but eloquent and perceptive English professor pushing me to think, dammit! If there’s any hope for us at all it’s that we resist the siren call of convenience, to give up our brains and become Meat Proxies.
Remember, what the dormouse said…
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