I hurt my friends with the AI slop I produce.
This has happened already twice, once at work with a good friend and once when creating this blog. I will try to focus on the second experience.
When making this blog, I threw in some random bullet point notes I have had lying around and asked the AI to write whatever it wants. This created a January journal entry that seemed assertive but lacked substance or a sense of who I am. The blog post had a section called "the art of a strategic no", right after I asked them if it is ok for me to not go on a trip that people have been excited to attend. This seemed like a horrible experience that I forced my friends through. In this post, I hope to explore why I keep doing this and why it is a bad practice. It is difficult to write and I will clean it up later. However, it seems important enough for me to put something on the page first before cleaning it up when this is still fresh.
Why am I writing?
To take my various thoughts and construct a narrative around it. In search of mental clarity. To fulfill my desire for sharing my thoughts with people around me.
Having coherent narratives that I share with friends help me get some certainty that a certain goal is worth striving for. There is no longer someone in my life that tells me the set of things I should work on. Yet, it is hard to come up with things that I will find worthwhile to work on. Writing helps me prioritize and get some certainty.
With AI code, the AI gives me some kind of narrative around my various thoughts. This narrative very rarely aligns with mine.
The AI likes to be a lot more confident in statements, with words like "my goal is to do x, not y". I very rarely say this. Perhaps it is because trading tends to have conclusions that are not black and white. Perhaps it is a sign of under-confidence. However, passages like these don't read like "my writing". In an essay, these stronger statements stick out like a sore thumb against a background of less-confident words.
Why do I like using AI so much?
Part of the reason is to turn off my internal critic around writing. I don't like the feeling of being bad at something, and historically writing has not been my strong suit. My thoughts tend to jump too quickly for a typical article. There are also certian quirks, like using "I" a lot when starting sentences. Part of this also comes from me having learned English as a second language, so the narrative of "I am not good at English" was present with me for much of my life.
I was watching a Youtube video about how using AI a bunch when coding or writing tends to turn off the parts of our brain that engages in critical thinking. It becomes more a "doom vibe coding" experience, where I just hit yes over and over and say "future me will fix it". Apparently these brain waves are similar to the ones found when we are in early stages of sleeping, and I can see that. The persona of "me using AI" seems distant enough from "myself" that I would see bad writing from the AI as unfortunate happenstances rather than a mistake I made myself.
However, the AI code is my code. The AI writing is my writing. Even if this internal dissociation exists, my friends will not know about this. When they see an article written by AI that does not align with what my writing looks like, the common update will be "oh I didn't know Richard thinks this way". AI writing erodes trust.
What is my writing?
Some random thoughts:
I see the AI writing and be like "what is this egotistical language, why is it so confident". I am probably more restrained in my writing than the AI.
I don't try to make a point out of every sentence I say, so that I have room to make a point when I think it is actually good.
Comparative literature vibe. I am a "1.5-th generation immigrant". Second generation American by birth, but spent my youth in China with a different culture.
My writing has lots of conceptual and narrative leaps. My brain thinks pretty fast and is able to draw connections between faraway concepts, and this shows up in my writing.
I remember lots of stories from my childhood. I have the gift of a particularly strong long term memory, likely thanks to mom. I can remember stories from every part of my life, including my elementary school days, which makes it distinct from the story of others.