A few days ago, I asked myself this question: “What happens when AI can say what you want to say better than you?” That question only scratches the surface of the malaise. For more than a year now, I have struggled with what to do, as someone who likes to write, when writing becomes ‘cheap’. Or should I say, to be more precise, that it is actually generating written artifacts that has become easier. There is a feeling that, now that one can write enormous amounts of blogs, essays, and reports, each one becomes less valuable. Text is no longer rare and precious like in ancient times. Just as synthetic diamonds are killing the natural diamond market, there is a sense that the synthetic writings we currently have wide access to are degrading the value of traditional human writing.

As the article says, the actual semantic information to be communicated must still come from the prompt. While an LLM might improve the organization and prose wrapped around it, it doesn't add true information itself. I think historically we have conflated these things but these new pressures are forcing them apart. Writing style is going to become more information dense.

> Fully AI-generated content will always be ontologically different from human creative outputs.

I get the vague sense that the author and a contingent of others see the ontological difference as primarily metaphysical. Specifically I see a version of essentialism of interiority that captures what the reader believes about the author(or lack of) and then projects upon the text.

Like all essentialism, it happens usually without the reader knowing that they're doing it - that the observations are mere facts of nature as if the authorship of judgement were erased.

We see this both ways, when text is revealed to be AI written folks will revise their initial praise. Likewise, when text is revealed to be written by a human, previous critique is swept under the rug and interiority that wasn't initial found is somehow revealed. All while the text has remained the same.

Dear readers, this is not an honest way to read. Text doesn't have metaphysical baggage, it is simply words on the page. Interiority is always an internal sense and an individual deduction. It is no more a property of the text than your favorite color actually possessing the property of being the best color in the world.

I'm not saying we have to like AI generated text, but let's leave the metaphysical baggage at home and read things honestly for once. We owe it to ourselves.

You know what's funny is that, in the movie 'Her', Theodore works full time as a personal letter writer (writes letters for other humans). It's funny because, at the time the movie was made the idea of AI had nothing to do with LLMs so humans still had a need to write things themselves despite carrying powerful AI devices in their pockets.

Just an interesting idea I had about how things are envisioned and how they ultimately play out in the real world.