But the amount of AI writing in this post is… zero. Not for title ideation, not for promotional copywriting, not even for a single phrase, or even a fragment of a phrase anywhere in the piece.
Not quite. You explicitly quoted this as a piece of AI writing:
Falling in love isn’t just about romance. It’s about discovering new parts of yourself.
AI or human, that’s a trite cliche. I’ll take your word for it that you wrote the subsequent expansion into a whole paragraph without AI assistance, but the paragraph is no better than what an AI would come up with.
That’s another hazard of AI slop: picking up its dull-witted habits by osmosis.
AI writing will gain usage because it has extraordinary capacity for good writing. But that only happens when you apply enough evolutionary selection pressure by exhibiting good taste.
AI has no capacity for good writing. (I am speaking of the here and now, not a hypothetical future.) You may set out to filter by good taste, but the process corrupts one’s taste, and filters for people who did not have good taste to begin with.
To adapt Nietzsche, when you step into the abyss, the abyss steps into you.
Really appreciate the comment, I enjoyed engaging with it! See below:
Not quite. You explicitly quoted this as a piece of AI writing
Ahah, this made me laugh. Yes, that’s true.
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Falling in love isn’t just about romance. It’s about discovering new parts of yourself.
AI or human, that’s a trite cliche. I’ll take your word for it that you wrote the subsequent expansion into a whole paragraph without AI assistance, but the paragraph is no better than what an AI would come up with.
I think this illustrates my point.
AI or human, that’s a trite cliche.
First: That point was counterintuitive, and therefore not trite, to me. Insights have a subjective property in which, “subverting a misconception with the truth” depends on which misconceptions an audience currently holds. The footnoted article by Esther Perel (Why Happy People Cheat) basically boils down to the same insight in a different form.[1]
I’ll take your word for it that you wrote the subsequent expansion into a whole paragraph without AI assistance,
Second: By having one’s guard up for AI writing, and having some hesitation/doubt about its authenticity, you’ll shade everything in a cynical tone and become less willing to accept ideas that you may have otherwise found insightful.
but the paragraph is no better than what an AI would come up with.
Third: I argue that if you ever feel this way about something you read, you have license to stop engaging with the material. In this sense, the spectre of AI writing is actually very liberating for developing your taste, even if nothing you ever read was written with AI.
---
That’s another hazard of AI slop: picking up its dull-witted habits by osmosis.
I guess I can give you an advance preview of the next essay: this is the first point it makes. As in, this current essay covers how for reading AI writing, you should develop and trust your own taste / independent judgment of what counts as good, rather than using presence of AI as a proxy.
But when it comes to writing (topic of the next essay), the same prescription to ‘develop and trust your taste’ leads to a near-opposite perspective—don’t use AI. My closing line in this essay; “I handle [writing with AI] like poison”; segues into the following epigraph; a quote by Orwell written about the language of his time, but which maps nearly 1:1 for modern AI usage:
But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought. A bad usage can spread by tradition and imitation, even among people who should and do know better. The debased language that I have been discussing is in some ways very convenient. Phrases like a not unjustifiable assumption, leaves much to be desired, would serve no good purpose, a consideration which we should do well to bear in mind, are a continuous temptation, a packet of aspirins always at one’s elbow. Look back through this essay, and for certain you will find that I have again and again committed the very faults I am protesting against.
Of course, it is more insightful because it also applies the first point in a short deductive chain to then resolve the titular enigma. Deductive chains are themselves a form of insight, I elaborate somewhat in another essay of mine (Lesswrong, Linkpost).
Not quite. You explicitly quoted this as a piece of AI writing:
AI or human, that’s a trite cliche. I’ll take your word for it that you wrote the subsequent expansion into a whole paragraph without AI assistance, but the paragraph is no better than what an AI would come up with.
That’s another hazard of AI slop: picking up its dull-witted habits by osmosis.
AI has no capacity for good writing. (I am speaking of the here and now, not a hypothetical future.) You may set out to filter by good taste, but the process corrupts one’s taste, and filters for people who did not have good taste to begin with.
To adapt Nietzsche, when you step into the abyss, the abyss steps into you.
Really appreciate the comment, I enjoyed engaging with it! See below:
Ahah, this made me laugh. Yes, that’s true.
---
I think this illustrates my point.
AI or human, that’s a trite cliche.
First: That point was counterintuitive, and therefore not trite, to me. Insights have a subjective property in which, “subverting a misconception with the truth” depends on which misconceptions an audience currently holds. The footnoted article by Esther Perel (Why Happy People Cheat) basically boils down to the same insight in a different form.[1]
I’ll take your word for it that you wrote the subsequent expansion into a whole paragraph without AI assistance,
Second: By having one’s guard up for AI writing, and having some hesitation/doubt about its authenticity, you’ll shade everything in a cynical tone and become less willing to accept ideas that you may have otherwise found insightful.
but the paragraph is no better than what an AI would come up with.
Third: I argue that if you ever feel this way about something you read, you have license to stop engaging with the material. In this sense, the spectre of AI writing is actually very liberating for developing your taste, even if nothing you ever read was written with AI.
---
I guess I can give you an advance preview of the next essay: this is the first point it makes. As in, this current essay covers how for reading AI writing, you should develop and trust your own taste / independent judgment of what counts as good, rather than using presence of AI as a proxy.
But when it comes to writing (topic of the next essay), the same prescription to ‘develop and trust your taste’ leads to a near-opposite perspective—don’t use AI. My closing line in this essay; “I handle [writing with AI] like poison”; segues into the following epigraph; a quote by Orwell written about the language of his time, but which maps nearly 1:1 for modern AI usage:
Of course, it is more insightful because it also applies the first point in a short deductive chain to then resolve the titular enigma. Deductive chains are themselves a form of insight, I elaborate somewhat in another essay of mine (Lesswrong, Linkpost).