I
Last year, I replaced my Apple Watch with a Casio F-91W, a marvel of engineering. Terry Godier has just posted an essay, ᔥJohn Gruber beautifully designed, about the merits of that very model over any smart watch you can get. By the topic, message, look and feel of the article I should love it. Instead, I get a visceral reaction when I come across a passage like this:
And that absence, the peace of a thing that does what it does and then shuts up, feels like the most luxurious thing I own.
Not because it’s retro. Not because it’s minimal.
Because it’s done.
And also these two passages, back to back:
Most of your screen time isn’t leisure. It isn’t addiction. It isn’t even a choice.
It’s maintenance.
Your phone is not a slot machine.
It’s a to-do list that writes itself.
Godier recently came out with Current, an RSS reader for iOS whose product pages resebles the Casio essay in both language and design. Not surprising — the authors is the same — but it did have a certain smell to it, a cadence of nots and buts that made me think when I first read that it was written by generative AI first, edited by a human second. The sheer length of the copy, leasurly meandering around the topic like the Colorado river’s double oxbow, made me think this was not the work of a software developer whould would probably rather spend time polishing their app than designing scrollable eye candy.
But hey, Godier makes software first, writes second. If generative LLMs help them make better software more quickly, and then they use the same tool for something that is not their primary occupation, then who am I to judge?
II
Two days ago, I linked to “Lobster Boil”, an essay from Om Malik about the rise of OpenClaw. This is a typical passage:
AI can be personal. Not a service you subscribe to. Not a platform you visit. A thing that runs on your machine, serves your intentions, uses the model you choose, and works through the apps you already live in
And here is a passage from Malik’s “Neo Symbolic Capitalism”:
Which is why Twitter, now X, feels unbeatable despite everything. It is not because the product is superior. It is because the people with the most power and the most to gain have turned it into a gaming platform for symbolic capital. They are not users. They are players. And the game is very, very good to them.
A sentiment I can get behind! But the style still makes my skin crawl. There are 13 “nots” and 4 “buts” in Malik’s essay. His 2024 “Silicon Valley’s Empathy Vacuum” has not a single “not”, and a single lonely “but”.
Om Malik used to write for a living.
III
This morning I was browsing my RSS feeds — via Inkling for Inkwell, of course — when I saw Doug Belshaw’s post about his 7-step approach for authentic AI-assisted blogging. Belshaw also writes the wonderful Thought Shrapnel blog, quoted here many times, so I was keen to learn more. I was sad to see that, among the seven steps, the one that generated the first draft of the post was relegated to AI. There is a human rewrite then, followed by evaluation of the final text by GPTzero.me to see how much humanity that rewrite managed to instill.
I mean, what are we even doing here?
The byline for Belshaw’s articles should be “Perplexity”, who shoud then thank Doug for giving them the idea, reading the first draft of the article, and helping them with revisions. Belshaw mentions in his 7-step guide that Cory Doctorow was panned when he shared his own approach to LLM asstiance in writing. Doctorow has AI proof-read his already written articles. This approach I can understand and will indeed start implementing one of these days: there have been one to many instances of extra parenthesis screwing up my Markdown, not to mention run-on sentences, unintentional non-sequiters and the like.
IV
I have written quite a few first drafts of scientific articles, and have revised countless more. The first draft is harder by far, but is also the one that makes the biggest mark. It sets the tone and, unless you have a particularly sadistic co-author who has the actual article already written and ready to use as redline all over your first attempt, will make the most of the final product.
Everything Godier, Malik and Belshaw write can and will be used to teach other LLMs about how to write. The fist-draft approach to LLM assistance is creating the AI ouroboros. I’d rather not be around to see it fully manifest.