It's actually more important as a skill to learning than the author realizes. It connects the brain to the CNS for deeper processing and memory retention of information.
> "That style took a lot of super annoying work to get to: good teachers and rewrites and mean online comments all contributed. If the AI does fine writing, I could skip all of that, but I would have done so the cost of giving up something that has turned out to be very important to my career and my happiness."
Ironic that there's a grammatical error here, that an AI wouldn't have made :)
Should be: "I would have done so *at* the cost of"
Another unfortunate irony is that the comments on this piece aren't particularly substantive, despite the fact that they're presumably (mostly) produced by humans.
A big problem with AI-written content beyond just the problem of repetitive writing patterns that become annoying, is that I have no idea of the person even reviewed what they posted. Since so much content is just created for engagement or SEO hacking on full autopilot, I tend to expect low quality in anything that sounds AI.
We must still keep the things that define us as human even if we are using AI tools. Most of us don't want to talk to bots or people that sound like bots. We want to have conversations with other humans. You can use AI, but don't make it the middleman between conversations we are having.
Authenticity needs to be a cultural value in the midst of this AI world in order to keep our sanity and values for life. More thoughts on that I wrote a while back here. FYI.
I see where you are coming from, but you can distinguish who is thinking on their own with low to medium support from AI and who is relying on AI to produce enormous amount of content that regular person wouldn’t be able to come up with. It shows it in the depth. It shows in the voice. It shows in the quality. AI is great to start and I see many starting but then giving up because it’s not sustainable or they didn’t get the expected results. Let’s also keep in mind that in the internet you don’t see the whole story of other people and let’s not assume we know it all - for instance for me the turning point to start writing was sabbatical leave, not the fact that I had suddenly access to the tool and could produce unlimited content. I wouldn’t speak if I had nothing to say.
I joined a Substack that promotes writers on the subject of AI. Within a couple of weeks of joining, I was disillusioned by the "article mill". The truly disheartening thing is how passionate people are about getting their thinking about there, but as you cite, it's obvious when you see "the script": Claude as a 'ghost writer' is the equivalent of the Haunted Mansion at Disneyworld. It really is off-putting once you recognise it. I've gotten to the point where if I hear a YouTube video narration begins and I identify the style I cut and run, because I now feel like the content can't be trusted (whether that's fair or not).
I've fallen into bad habits a number of times due to time-crunch and sheer over commitment of letting AI do the hard part. Or the rote part, at least. I realized fairly recently though that I could bake in my own "learning" mode pretty easily on all the major product platforms, though it does come at a bit of a token cost.
I've amended the instructions/memory of most of my platforms to "communicate in a Socratic method to refine confidence and assist my own output rather than supply finalized content". It usually results in answers that get right to the point if it's a simple request or already something inclined to ideation. As soon as it looks like I'm reaching for a quick draft of a post, article, or training aid at work though, it starts peppering me back with questions and assistance like outlines rather than a finalized piece right away.
Not at all! Happy to compare notes any time. I firmly believe we haven't uncovered a fraction of the best practices and amazing opportunities available with just the AI we have today, and knowledge sharing is the only way to even get started on diving deeper!
What a great piece! We’re a big fan of human-centered creation. On the other side of critical thinking and intentional friction, you’ll find outputs that other humans actually like and find compelling at a soul level.
You might call it the “second jagged frontier” ;) This time not around what AI can or cannot (yet) do, but around what humans should or should not (yet) surrender to the AI.
Great post! I continually tell people that they are using AI incorrectly by having it give us the answers all of the time and we need to be prompting AI more to ask us the questions and use our brain power to do the work instead. I've had better interactions with various AI apps by having it interview me, be a facilitator, use the Socratic method, etc. for ideation, challenging assumptions, etc. The reason why I say people are using AI incorrectly is due to a continual theory of mine that our digital literacy as a whole is below average, we never learned how to use search tools like Google properly, and we have now continued these habits using AI.
This sentence by Jamie Horgan is worth a post or five in itself:
"In many cases, the reader of an email might spend more time grappling with the contents of an email than the sender did. There's something rude about that!"
As Agentic AI continues to blossom in day-to-day work, I keep thinking about what we, as a society, consider creative work. What does creativity mean, and if your creative thinking is being used to have AI do something specific that used to be considered creative work, whether it’s writing or painting, why is that not considered art? If your thoughts get crafted, in your eyes, as a work of art, why is that not considered to be art? Yes, the philosophical take on society and what is considered art will remain a subject of discussion in the coming years as Agentic AI advances.
"Cognitive surrender" captures a lot of what I have been concerned about with the proliferation of AI chatbots into all aspects of modern life. What do we want to cede over to AI and what do we need to reserve as a primarily human activity?
As an educator, I worry about how young minds will develop critical thinking, judgement, and reasoning skills in the face of tools that appear to do all the hard work for them. Even in areas like dating we are seeing indications that people are relying on LLMs to write their texts for them.
I do see push back from young people to AI generated content and AI doing the thinking for people. But the actual industry needs stronger government and societal oversight to ensure that we don't go down a path that will be hard to roll back.
Pope Leo's recentl encyclical on AI is a strong cautionary appeal that I hope that others will echo and amplify.
Incredibly thoughtful piece about what’s in front of us as humans - I just wonder what you think can be done so that AI helps to inspire critical thinking instead of outsourcing it.
Last year I thought that AI will make it easier to read, not write, by eliminating poor writing but now we have all this slop all over the place and I can absolutely relate to just skipping text at first sight of AI stock phrases and sentence structures.
From own experience, there certainly still is hunger and motivation in students to not use AI to learn to write, albeit they are a minority. I have my management class two options for an assignment - with and without AI - and was pleasantly surprised when one of the students said that she was happy to finally NOT have to use AI, suggesting there is peer and/or competitive pressure for students to shortcut with AI in order to not fall behind their more surrender-prone colleagues.
All in all, I don’t see majority choosing to stay human, students or otherwise, but some will and should be encouraged to do so.
The Turkey vs. Taipei contrast is doing a lot of work here, and I think it generalizes beyond education.
Same technology. Two deployments. Categorically different outcomes. The variable isn't AI capability or even user intentionality as a disposition. It's whether the deployment scaffolds the effortful work or short-circuits it. The Anthropic programmer study you cite points the same direction: the ones who asked the AI to explain, or who delegated only parts, kept the loop intact. The ones who surrendered the whole task lost the learning that would have come from doing it.
This is why I think "be intentional" can only carry so much weight as advice. Intentionality is a disposition. What actually produces different outcomes is practice, a learned habit of using AI as friction against your first thought rather than as an amplifier of it. Most people, left to defaults, do the opposite, because the defaults are built for frictionless output.
Your final point is the one I keep coming back to in my own writing: the defaults are being set right now, by people optimizing for use rather than for what use does to us over time. Reversing them later, after a generation has built habits around them, will be much harder than getting them right now.
Agreed with most of this but I'm glad my kids are still learning cursive in their school!
my AI proofreader warned me that my views on cursive would be the most controversial aspect of the post 😅.
Your AI proof reader was right! 😂
It's actually more important as a skill to learning than the author realizes. It connects the brain to the CNS for deeper processing and memory retention of information.
> "That style took a lot of super annoying work to get to: good teachers and rewrites and mean online comments all contributed. If the AI does fine writing, I could skip all of that, but I would have done so the cost of giving up something that has turned out to be very important to my career and my happiness."
Ironic that there's a grammatical error here, that an AI wouldn't have made :)
Should be: "I would have done so *at* the cost of"
Another unfortunate irony is that the comments on this piece aren't particularly substantive, despite the fact that they're presumably (mostly) produced by humans.
Those are my mean online comments for the day
A big problem with AI-written content beyond just the problem of repetitive writing patterns that become annoying, is that I have no idea of the person even reviewed what they posted. Since so much content is just created for engagement or SEO hacking on full autopilot, I tend to expect low quality in anything that sounds AI.
We must still keep the things that define us as human even if we are using AI tools. Most of us don't want to talk to bots or people that sound like bots. We want to have conversations with other humans. You can use AI, but don't make it the middleman between conversations we are having.
Authenticity needs to be a cultural value in the midst of this AI world in order to keep our sanity and values for life. More thoughts on that I wrote a while back here. FYI.
https://www.mindprison.cc/p/make-authenticity-great-again
One thing I really grapple with is that I can see so many technical professionals now pumping out substacks, essays and LinkedIn content.
They are clearly enthused by the prospect that their thoughts, feelings and emotions can now be translated into beautiful prose.
In a way, I am all here for it.
But as I start to consume the content, this feeling of dread creeps upon me:
“Oh no, this [actuary, accountant, scientist etc] has outsourced their mind to AI”
They have slid down a rabbit hole I fear might be impossible to climb back out of.
I see where you are coming from, but you can distinguish who is thinking on their own with low to medium support from AI and who is relying on AI to produce enormous amount of content that regular person wouldn’t be able to come up with. It shows it in the depth. It shows in the voice. It shows in the quality. AI is great to start and I see many starting but then giving up because it’s not sustainable or they didn’t get the expected results. Let’s also keep in mind that in the internet you don’t see the whole story of other people and let’s not assume we know it all - for instance for me the turning point to start writing was sabbatical leave, not the fact that I had suddenly access to the tool and could produce unlimited content. I wouldn’t speak if I had nothing to say.
You had me at "...meaning-shaped attention vampires that take mental effort to decode..."
I joined a Substack that promotes writers on the subject of AI. Within a couple of weeks of joining, I was disillusioned by the "article mill". The truly disheartening thing is how passionate people are about getting their thinking about there, but as you cite, it's obvious when you see "the script": Claude as a 'ghost writer' is the equivalent of the Haunted Mansion at Disneyworld. It really is off-putting once you recognise it. I've gotten to the point where if I hear a YouTube video narration begins and I identify the style I cut and run, because I now feel like the content can't be trusted (whether that's fair or not).
I've fallen into bad habits a number of times due to time-crunch and sheer over commitment of letting AI do the hard part. Or the rote part, at least. I realized fairly recently though that I could bake in my own "learning" mode pretty easily on all the major product platforms, though it does come at a bit of a token cost.
I've amended the instructions/memory of most of my platforms to "communicate in a Socratic method to refine confidence and assist my own output rather than supply finalized content". It usually results in answers that get right to the point if it's a simple request or already something inclined to ideation. As soon as it looks like I'm reaching for a quick draft of a post, article, or training aid at work though, it starts peppering me back with questions and assistance like outlines rather than a finalized piece right away.
I like the instruction you use. I hope you don’t mind that I plan to use it in Claude to assist me in the law school class I teach. Thanks!
Not at all! Happy to compare notes any time. I firmly believe we haven't uncovered a fraction of the best practices and amazing opportunities available with just the AI we have today, and knowledge sharing is the only way to even get started on diving deeper!
What a great piece! We’re a big fan of human-centered creation. On the other side of critical thinking and intentional friction, you’ll find outputs that other humans actually like and find compelling at a soul level.
We’re a fan of your work!
You might call it the “second jagged frontier” ;) This time not around what AI can or cannot (yet) do, but around what humans should or should not (yet) surrender to the AI.
Great post! I continually tell people that they are using AI incorrectly by having it give us the answers all of the time and we need to be prompting AI more to ask us the questions and use our brain power to do the work instead. I've had better interactions with various AI apps by having it interview me, be a facilitator, use the Socratic method, etc. for ideation, challenging assumptions, etc. The reason why I say people are using AI incorrectly is due to a continual theory of mine that our digital literacy as a whole is below average, we never learned how to use search tools like Google properly, and we have now continued these habits using AI.
This sentence by Jamie Horgan is worth a post or five in itself:
"In many cases, the reader of an email might spend more time grappling with the contents of an email than the sender did. There's something rude about that!"
As Agentic AI continues to blossom in day-to-day work, I keep thinking about what we, as a society, consider creative work. What does creativity mean, and if your creative thinking is being used to have AI do something specific that used to be considered creative work, whether it’s writing or painting, why is that not considered art? If your thoughts get crafted, in your eyes, as a work of art, why is that not considered to be art? Yes, the philosophical take on society and what is considered art will remain a subject of discussion in the coming years as Agentic AI advances.
"Cognitive surrender" captures a lot of what I have been concerned about with the proliferation of AI chatbots into all aspects of modern life. What do we want to cede over to AI and what do we need to reserve as a primarily human activity?
As an educator, I worry about how young minds will develop critical thinking, judgement, and reasoning skills in the face of tools that appear to do all the hard work for them. Even in areas like dating we are seeing indications that people are relying on LLMs to write their texts for them.
I do see push back from young people to AI generated content and AI doing the thinking for people. But the actual industry needs stronger government and societal oversight to ensure that we don't go down a path that will be hard to roll back.
Pope Leo's recentl encyclical on AI is a strong cautionary appeal that I hope that others will echo and amplify.
Incredibly thoughtful piece about what’s in front of us as humans - I just wonder what you think can be done so that AI helps to inspire critical thinking instead of outsourcing it.
Last year I thought that AI will make it easier to read, not write, by eliminating poor writing but now we have all this slop all over the place and I can absolutely relate to just skipping text at first sight of AI stock phrases and sentence structures.
From own experience, there certainly still is hunger and motivation in students to not use AI to learn to write, albeit they are a minority. I have my management class two options for an assignment - with and without AI - and was pleasantly surprised when one of the students said that she was happy to finally NOT have to use AI, suggesting there is peer and/or competitive pressure for students to shortcut with AI in order to not fall behind their more surrender-prone colleagues.
All in all, I don’t see majority choosing to stay human, students or otherwise, but some will and should be encouraged to do so.
The Turkey vs. Taipei contrast is doing a lot of work here, and I think it generalizes beyond education.
Same technology. Two deployments. Categorically different outcomes. The variable isn't AI capability or even user intentionality as a disposition. It's whether the deployment scaffolds the effortful work or short-circuits it. The Anthropic programmer study you cite points the same direction: the ones who asked the AI to explain, or who delegated only parts, kept the loop intact. The ones who surrendered the whole task lost the learning that would have come from doing it.
This is why I think "be intentional" can only carry so much weight as advice. Intentionality is a disposition. What actually produces different outcomes is practice, a learned habit of using AI as friction against your first thought rather than as an amplifier of it. Most people, left to defaults, do the opposite, because the defaults are built for frictionless output.
Your final point is the one I keep coming back to in my own writing: the defaults are being set right now, by people optimizing for use rather than for what use does to us over time. Reversing them later, after a generation has built habits around them, will be much harder than getting them right now.