(Human)

This website and all my courses and newsletters were hand-typed by me, a single human being.

I’ve got nothing against bots and automation! I literally have a robot tattooed on my forearm.

But using large language models to produce humanesque text and sharing it with other humans strikes me as a decidedly misanthropic act. It’s particularly egregious if you pass off a piece of writing without noting that you prompted a toy robot to produce it, but even when you add a disclaimer, all I can wonder is why?

Why did you tell a thing to tell me a thing, instead of just telling me? Why did you think I would want to read something so generic and low-effort? Why are you wasting my time?

I feel sad about this. I find myself mournfully clicking ‘Unsubscribe’ on newsletters of people I know to be creative and original thinkers, because they’ve decided to pivot to sharing things like “I asked ChatGPT this question, here’s its response.” I watch colleagues cast about desperately to think of some use case for a tool that doesn’t seem to solve an actual problem so they can … feel smart?

I’m not sure what’s going on. But I will continue to type my own imperfect prose. Thanks for reading it.

(Human)

Next time I write something, I'll let you know.