Idea delivery vehicles

Sometimes I call french fries “ketchup delivery vehicles.” In the same way, words are my idea delivery vehicles.

There are a few newsletters that I receive from friends of mine that have really wonderful ideas but are obviously written by AI.

I was talking with my wife about this, who commented that many readers of posts on Substack find the dominance of AI writing to be distasteful, and how readers often unsubscribe when they see an AI written post.

She and I agreed: we will use AI for drafting a social media post, or doing some data analysis that drives our understanding of an issue when we are writing about it, but that we would not use AI to write a newsletter on our behalf. I think that is because both she and I have developed strong and clear voices in our writing, so it feels wrong to have our ideas expressed without our voice.

But there are a lot of people who have really valuable ideas who have never developed their writing voice. I really like the idea of people who have great ideas finding a way to express those ideas using AI. In some sense, I’m only annoyed by the fact that AI is not good enough to write a better (often this means a more concise) version of their ideas.

So I am looking forward to when AI is good enough that I am no longer preoccupied by how some ideas are wrapped in AI-prose. Instead, I can just enjoy the great ideas.

(I fed this post to ChatGPT and asked it for a title, but I didn’t like its ideas so I used my own).