My Post-Ai Writing

I’m only saying that people who enjoy creative writing purely or mostly for the process itself have no real use for AI assistance.

AI allows me to retreat to industrial intermediate production. To being a OEM vendor of words. Some assembly required. Which I now trust you to do with AI help even if you have no aptitude for verbal refinement and finishing processes.

This means when I do things that seem audience-pleasing, it’s because I enjoy them too. I occasionally enjoy wordplay, memes, pastiche, and lyrical writing, so you readers get treated to my attempts too. Not all writerly pleasures coincide with readerly pleasures.

More generally, I mostly don’t care about the aesthetics of writing, which are almost entirely for the benefit of readers. This includes the aesthetics of brevity and structure (the architecture as opposed to the brick-by-brick part). Sometimes I enjoy the challenge of maximal tightening, compressing, re-ordering for better flow, shortening, and si

But AI has had an indirect positive and enjoyable effect on my writing: It has made me lower my craftsmanship standards, which were never very high to begin with. This is one reason I’m writing a lot more this year. The causal chain from AI is subtle

was asked in a DM conversation whether I use AI for writing, and I said no, it would be like going for a walk in my car. The only people who seem to directly use AI for writing are people who don’t write for pleasure, but have to write a lot of functional, business-like things that are too varied for boilerplate templates. The sort of writing that

Now text has its own camera moment making “photorealism” pointless. Refinement writing — the photorealism part — is now about a reader photographing a scene created by a writer, from a particular angle.