After a long break, I’ve started writing again. Honestly, I think it’s one of the most incredible things in life.
Thanks to AI, which can push any text toward a particular style (an average style, after all, and a pretty flat one), I’ve been able to pick out several patterns that my friends who work in journalism and writing obviously don’t have. I got so obsessed with this that I subscribed to a bunch of newsletters about writing. One of them is by a man who critiques the work of young writers who want to write novels or tell stories. It’s a really interesting read, and the whole idea is incredibly powerful.
Some of my friends worry a lot about the moment AI steals the human voice. Personally, I find that exhausting. I wrote about it in a Hacker News comment, but the point is simple: reviewing and fixing a text that an AI generated is much more expensive than writing it yourself in the first place. There is so much to repair that the result ends up being a ship of Theseus, with so many changes and so many things to improve that you probably should have written it yourself.
In fact, post-LLM quality monitoring is a huge time trap. I can’t write anything for humans using LLMs, because there is so much to change that it ends up like the Ship of Theseus, I would have been faster writing it myself than delegating the task.
That’s one side. The other side is this: if AI can steal our voice and our style, it will, and I don’t think that’s something to lose sleep over. If someone does it on purpose to other people, that’s probably very unethical. I’ve tried it on myself to see how far I could get, with MarceLLo, a project where I train an LLM to capture my writing style. It’s incredibly hard, a bit harder than you’d expect. Again, it’s a cost problem. Commissioning a newsletter from an AI and then having a person correct all of it is wildly inefficient.
“But at some point it will be efficient.” Sure, but then it becomes a game of cat and mouse. Once it’s efficient, humans will eventually learn to recognize that kind of style, a sort of uncanny valley will set in, and it will stop impressing us. We’ll go back to wanting the stories we truly want to hear: the things that hook us, the opinions, the ways of writing, the ways of seeing life, the perspective. Of course, you can copy the script of a famous movie to write a story, but that doesn’t make it yours, and it doesn’t make it any greater than it already is. The same goes for style.
Style will eventually be replicable. I don’t doubt that. What I’d point out is that even when style is replicable, it becomes kind of ethereal. Take negative parallelism, the “it’s this, not that” construction. It was once a powerful, interesting way to write. But we’ve seen so much of it that we now know a robot wrote it. Not always, but humans tend to dismiss the message because of it. That’s what writing is for, after all.