Nobody wants to read AI
People may want to write with AI, but the real question is whether readers want to read it.
Some people want to use AI.
Some people want to tell us to use AI.
Some people want to warn us that our jobs will be taken by AI (sorry, a person using AI).
But there’s a problem. Nobody wants to read AI.
AI may be the future of writing. But that doesn’t mean it’s the future of reading.
Writing is more than putting words on a page. It’s a process of communicating ideas, emotions and stories from one human being to another.
AI writing, meanwhile, is a cognitive pyramid scam. It’s a fraud on the reader. The writer who uses AI is trying to get the reader to invest their time and attention without investing any of their own.
We only have one life. If we choose to invest some of our lifetime in reading something, we want to feel, and to know, that the writer put in some lifetime of their own.
And in general, the more time and effort the writer puts in, the more value we get out. This holds true for everything, from a slogan to a novel. Good things only happen when both writer and reader have skin in the game. The best writing is a dance between the writer’s desire to tell and the reader’s desire to know.
We read to know we are not alone. But when we read AI, that’s exactly what we are. Like Deckard in Blade Runner, we’ve been duped into engaging with a machine.
The true test of AI writing is not some attaining some arbitrary technical benchmark, but people choosing to read it.
That doesn’t mean people being temporarily deceived or not caring that much either way. It means people actively and knowingly choosing AI. Not as a pound-shop substitute, but as a thing in itself, equal or even superior to human writing.
If that happens, we will know the future has arrived. But I don’t think it ever will.