AI writing will make people who write worse than average, better writers. It'll also make people who write better than average, worse writers. Know where you stand, and have the taste to use wisely.

EDIT: also, just like creating AGENT.md files to help AI write code your way for your projects, etc. If you're going to be doing much writing, you should have your own prompt that can help with your voice and style. Don't be lazy, just because you're leaning on LLMs.

> AI writing will make people who write worse than average, better writers.

Maybe it will make them output better text, but it doesn’t make them better writers. That’d be like saying (to borrow the analogy from the post) that using an excavator makes you better at lifting weights. It doesn’t. You don’t improve, you don’t get better, it’s only the produced artefact which becomes superficially different.

> If you're going to be doing much writing, you should have your own prompt that can help with your voice and style.

The point of the article is the thinking. Style is something completely orthogonal. It’s irrelevant to the discussion.

Here's my definition of good writing: it's efficient and communicates precisely what you want to convey in an easy to understand way

AI is almost the exact opposite. It's verbose fluff that's only superficially structured well. It's worse than average

(waiting for someone to reply that I can tell the AI to be concise and meaningful)

i think a lot of people that use AI to help them write want it specifically BECAUSE it makes them boring and generic.

and that's because people have a weird sort of stylistic cargo-culting that they use to evaluate their writing rather than deciding "does this communicate my ideas efficiently"?

for example, young grad students will always write the most opaque and complicated science papers. from their novice perspective, EVERY paper they read is a little opaque and complicated so they try to emulate that in their writing.

office workers do the same thing. every email from corporate is bland and boring and uses far too many words to say nothing. you want your style to match theirs, so you dump it into an AI machine and you're thrilled that your writing has become just as vapid and verbose as your CEO.

A table saw doesn’t make you a better carpenter. It makes you faster - for better or worse.

LLMs and agents work the same way. They’re power tools. Skill and judgment determine whether you build more, or lose fingers faster.

Highly doubt that since its the complete opposite for coding. Whats missing for people of all skill levels is that writing helps you organize your thoughts, but that can happen at prompt time?

Time, effort, and skill being equal, I would suggest that AI access generally improves the quality of any given output. The issue is that AI use is only externally identifiable when at least one of those inputs is low, which makes it easy to develop poor heuristics.

No one finds AI-assisted prose/code/ideas boring, per se. They find bad prose/code/ideas boring. "AI makes you boring" is this generation's version of complaining about typing or cellular phones. AI is just a tool; it's up to humans how to use it.

This claim sounds plausible, but it is also testable. Do you know whether this has actually been tested in an experimental setting?

> AI writing will make people who write worse than average, better writers.

If they don't care enough to improve themselves at the task in the first place then why would they improve at all? Osmosis?

If this worked then letting a world renown author write all my letters for me will make me a better writer. Right?

Who cares if you're a "good writer?" Are you "easy to understand" is the real achievement.

After telling Copilot to lose the em-dash, never say “It’s not A, it’s B” and avoid alternating one-sentence and long paragraphs it had the gall to tell me it wrote better than most people.