A quick note before today's letter—I'm running a new workshop on Thursday, September 3, called Productivity for Writers.

It's about how to work more effectively as a writer WITHOUT relying on AI. Timely, no? It's only $99. Anyone who registers can join the live session and access the recording, but it won't be available after that, so you've only a bit of time left to register. Hope to see you there!

Hi friend,

Scott here. Did you see they're “watermarking” the LLM text now? If your shoddily-conceived nuclear reactor that no one wanted melts down please don't expect my applause for throwing a few ice cubes on top. But sure, yeah, good for y'all.

Effectively, if I am in fact understanding correctly, each word the thing generates is like a ball pulled from a special bingo cage containing every possible next word that would make sense. They can then use a key to make it pick the fifth ball or ninth or nine-hundredth instead of whatever random ball it was going to pick. A cage for each word, a nudge for each cage, and there you go—known randomness. So it's better than asking whether the essay contains the word delve or too many em dashes, but it's also not foolproof. This will likely spawn a whole new business model, and yet more services institutions will have to pay for.

There are of course ways of detecting AI-generated text that don't rely on an API. Falling asleep in the middle of reading it can be one. Another: I had strong suspicions of AI usage by students in a recent content strategy course when I was introduced to new authors such as Rahel Anne Bailstein and Erika Hall Kissane—fabricated amalgams of the names of actual human beings I know that have notably contributed to the fields of content and UX.

I worked with a guy at Mailchimp who uses generative models and machine learning—now all lumped in under the AI banner—to create incredible works of art; I bought a print for my partner! But he could also make incredible art with film, paper, markers, whatever. For him, these things are a means to an end; tools applied in deliberate and sometimes off-label ways to achieve specific, if flexible, aims. And like a good photographer who takes 1,000 snapshots and perhaps only includes 1 or 2 in a gallery show, he of course reviews and curates what has been generated.

For some of my students, and for an incredible number of business people, however, AI is not seen as a means to an end but rather as an end to all other means. It's the "last thing" to master, the thing that means you don't have to learn, do, or get better at anything else. The beginning, middle, and end of the story are all contained within the conversation-ending, creativity-killing, planet-burning, heart-breaking refrain of “just use AI”.

After all, why oh why would you waste time listing, outlining, drafting, reading, researching...doing ANYTHING other than shitting half-formed lumps of brain matter into an input field and hitting return as fast as possible? You don't even need an idea, because it can make those, too. The problem as I see it is not so much that AI tools create copy that gets used as the final draft of an ad or email or report or essay—the text that now gets "watermarked"—but rather that it replaces the entire process of writing—a process that is very accessible, very important, very effortful, and very, very underdeveloped in most people.

In my experience—as I'm sure I've shared with you before—people who say they're “bad” at writing are really saying “writing makes uncomfortable”, or perhaps “I don't have anything resembling a process for writing”.

Which, yeah. That makes sense. If you consistently avoid learning about something, don't develop any process or knowledge about the topic, and pay someone deal with it when there's a problem, you're not going to feel like you’re very good at it—because you’re not. This is why I'm a terrible mechanic and an even worse acrobat. (I'm not sure what kind of problems can be solved by an acrobat, but I assure you that I will hire a professional should I encounter one.)

Thing is, though, that being a terrible mechanic affects my life, at worst, about once every five years…mostly in the form of temporary social embarrassment or a nagging feeling that I got ripped off by the shop. Being a “terrible” writer—that is, someone who struggles to articulate thoughts and put them into words that others can make sense of—would make very nearly everything I do much, much harder. So I've worked to get better at it. And I've worked to help other people get better at it, too, and will keep doing so, wherever the tools take us. I still believe in writing, which is why I thought to write to you today. I hope you're doing well out there, friend.

Cheers,
Scott