Coté

If you’re dyslexic and just trying to communicate more clearly in writing, or you’ve got a bullshit job and you just want to get your bullshit job’s bullshit tasks out of the way so you can move on to more meaningful endeavors, or at least move past the day-to-day slog that permeates your workday and serves no real purpose other than to pay the bills, then I cede; I cannot fault you.

From: “LLMs Are Antithetical to Writing and Humanity”

As I like to say, if it’s bullshit work, let the bullshit artist do it.

I think we can all agree on cheese on that one.

How about work that isn’t bullshit?

One objection to AI driven writing and learning is that it’s too easy. I’m leering of the Protestant take on work and learning: if it’s not painful (“struggle”), it’s not worthy. The worth of something is proportional to how much suffering it requires.

With writing, I favor a more pragmatic approach: did people read it? Did they like it? Then it “works.” The quality of writing is proportional to the reader’s acceptance of it.

There are many aesthetics for that, many audiences. If your readers like to know - even hear tales of - your suffering to make it, then that is success. For example, Joan Dideon and Hunter Thompson evidence this pain of writing and the process - that is part of the gonzo aesthetic. Susan Sontag has a different kind of suffering aesthetic in her writing.

Hemingway has a machismo version of good writing is suffering: I bled this out, aren’t I man? Fitzgerald effortlessly hides it, and it’s all as much a part of Sarah Manguso’s writing as the actual suffering she is writing about and vibing.

As reader, knowing that those writers suffered to give you this text is part of the enjoyment, the essence of the writing, how it makes the reader react and feel, and with the best of that writing, how it changes the reader.¹

For most readers…some don’t care, they just want to laugh at Hunter Thompson talking to Nixon at the urinals or feel a kindred spirit as Joan Didion processes slow death of her daughter and husband. Or thrill in the cleverness of Sontag.

If you saw the suffering of writing Dungeon Crawler Carl, it would ruin the awesomeness of that series.

Similarly, when you read The Economist or an AP report, you don’t want to know about the suffering. You want to get information as clearly and quickly as possible. If you’re a writer, you may know that much suffering was done; more precisely, you know how incredibly skilled those writers are to avoid suffering and work quickly.

So, when it comes to using LLM’s for writing, my criteria is “did it work?” Defining “work” there is the real question because it’s defined by your goals and readers, and also your constraints (time, ability, cost, etc.)

In the original, dyslexia is used as a justification for writing. I’d add something more widespread: not being trained - not having suffered to learn! - how to write. If you need to write something and you “don’t know” how to write, to get accomplish your goal, to get on with life, use AI. That won’t always be “bullshit” work.

I think that’s one thing that’s driving writers and readers crazy. Similarly, professional programmers are (rightly) freaking out that with code generators more people can now code. They are having an aesthetic reaction: coding should require suffering. Now: no suffering required, and that’s fine.

To that end, the original piece; lays out excellent advice on how to integrate AI, as a tool, into what you do. More like a philosophy of how to do it.

Also, highly related is this take on MrBeast. Clearly, the author does not like the aesthetics of MrBeast’s work. But, civilization has shown that it “works.” I don’t like Shakespeare (at all) and I find Victorian literature tiresome. I much prefer still lifes with huge chunks of cheese and shucked oysters over pictures of soup cans. People have different aesthetics, so it goes.