I recently listened to the Pragmatic Engineer podcast episode “Stop being skeptical about AI for development” with Charity Majors. It was a great conversation, and I found her takes on GenAI to be balanced and thoughtful. But she made one statement about using AI for writing that resonated so strongly with me, I had to go back and listen to it again so I could share it here. She said:
“You cannot send anyone something you haven’t read. And in fact, if it would take them longer to read it than it took you to make it, it’s probably slop. That’s really disrespectful. Anytime I give you something, I’m asking for your time and attention. And if I’m giving you something that I don’t even know what’s in it and I’m putting it on you, it costs you instead of me.” — Charity Majors
Like anyone working in technology, I’ve been grappling with AI and figuring out where it does and doesn’t make sense to use. But when it comes to writing for human consumption… whether prose or fiction… whether email or blogs or books or social media posts or whatever… I feel more strongly than ever that anyone who’s physically and mentally able to should do their own writing. Because getting back to Charity’s point, it’s about respect. It’s about respecting others’ limited time and resources. And I would argue, it’s also about respecting yourself and what you have to say.
Writing is probably the most miraculous and useful invention of all time. Writing *is* thinking. And the whole point of it is to express something as a human being to another human being. Every word you write is a projection of yourself. But every word you write is also a demand on the readers. And wading through the river of generated slop posts on LinkedIn and every other platform over the past few years has been absolutely soul-crushing.
At the very least, if you’re going to use GenAI to assist you in writing, please do your readers the courtesy of at least reading it yourself before asking them to.
Make your words count. Don’t just artificially increase your word count.