Unfortunately (or fortunately), AI is useless to me for writing.
Well, not entirely: I use it to fix typos, translate into English, suggest a synonym when I'm stuck. (And even then: I still have my thesaurus.)
But when it comes to producing an idea or a text, I'm surprised every time by how useless it is.
It's a blender. It mixes everything together. Produces mush, then compresses it into neat little squares to make it look like structured thought.
If you're reading quickly about a subject you don't know, you can be fooled.
It can also be useful for producing informational text on an existing body of knowledge. In that case, the sheer volume of information it holds allows it to structure, argue, teach.
And of course, it's extremely useful for building your own tools. I no longer buy software: I produce the scripts I need, custom-made for my use.
But for writing something new... Nothing works.
Strong ideas get flattened.
Sharp phrasing gets smoothed into something generic and bland.
The style is either needlessly ornate (too many words, too many adjectives, too much of everything) or too dry.
Of course, I tried custom instructions. Iteratively. Based on samples.
The result is worse: text and instructions get tangled into a mess from which nothing comes out intact.
Because ultimately, it's not a prompt problem, it's a structural one. The LLM thinks "flat": there's no topography of thought, no layers of reasoning at different levels of importance.
Everything sits at the same level.
The latest brain fart carries as much weight as the founding axiom placed at the beginning. Key points, the joints of the argument, emotional nodes carry no more weight than asides. To the AI, everything is instruction.
I suppose that's good news for my readers and clients: my notes and my narrative strategy reports are all written by hand.
Not for ethical reasons. Not to save the planet.
Because I have no choice.
I'm kidding, obviously.
The whole point of notes is writing them myself. Not for the reader – for me. I need to put ideas on paper to clear my head, so AI has no role in that.
As for the documents I deliver to clients: they are extremely spartan. No layout, no long sentences: just the ideas.
Maybe that's the future of human work, when you think about it.
Now, the packaging, the examples, the filler ("the mush") can be produced by machines.
So the value of the human is direction. The few words that set the course. The pitfalls. The route.
And style. The unique, personal way of naming the world.
The rest is zeros and ones.