I reread Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style recently, and I’m increasingly irritated by AI writing.
It is going to get better over time, but LLMs write like a third grader trying to impress you by using more words than necessary. To quote French aviator and author Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, “Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.”
AI writing does the opposite. I have trained Claude, ChatGPT, and Gemini on millions of my words, and they still don’t come close to matching my style.
I spent the weekend before Responsive Conference rewriting all the copy on the Responsive website. The website didn’t really need it. At that stage, we were going to have a successful conference regardless. But I decided that the most significant thing I could do to improve the conference was improve our communication about the experience. And I was surprised to find myself looking forward to rewriting the website.
I enjoy hard things. I sit in a cold plunge every morning. I stopped drinking alcohol six years ago because I was becoming reliant on the dulling of sensation it provided. As Codie Sanchez says: “Suffering has always been my drug of choice.”
I also find the aggressive, hyper-masculine “discipline” espoused by David Goggins, among others, both boring and nausea-inducing. I don’t perform well when I “ought to.” I prefer carrots over sticks.
We’re going to see an increasing disparity in how people use technology: between those who use technology to challenge themselves and those who embrace the ways these tools make life frictionless. I am liable to fall into either camp.
We have food engineered to be perfectly salty and sweet, GLP-1s for weight loss, and media tuned to every person.
I am prone to addiction. I’ve always struggled with my TV addiction. If I start a show, I feel a near-physical compulsion to finish the show before doing anything else, including work or sleeping. I deleted TikTok because it was too compelling; hours would go by while I stared at my screen in a stupor.
The only video game I allow myself to play is called BrainHQ, by Posit Science and Michael Merzenich of UCSF. The scientific research on the benefits show a reduced risk of dementia. AAA provides it free for their members because it’s shown to reduce car accidents.
BrainHQ’s exercises are infuriating because every time you succeed at one of the tests, it gets harder. The games are designed to keep you on the cusp of failure. They are designed to avoid plateaus.
AI makes things easy. Writing is hard. Like BrainHQ, it keeps me on the cusp of failure. The solution to the coming AI divide is to look for pleasure in challenge.
