Stephen Llevano

In Defense of Writing. A disturbing trend I see emerging is people lazily generating longer form content from bullet points or dictation they give to an LLM, and then passing it off as their own. Beyond the obvious breach of trust and social expectation when doing this, there are several more nuanced but equally insidious problems with doing this. First, writing is thinking. If you aren't taking the time to write, edit, rework, reshape, and play with your words, you're shortcutting a key aspect of refining an thought. You rob yourself of this opportunity if you just skip to the end. I have yet to read anything generated that even comes close to the clarity and impact of a well-written piece. Second, respect. Very few people will tell you this to your face, but as soon as they read something 'from you' that has all the tell-tale signs of AI slop, their respect (and trust) for you drops. What you are communicating is that you don't take the time and effort to do things properly, or at least entirely honestly. This is damaging in way many don't realize. I instantly discount anything I read as soon as I recognize it as AI slop. Third, and I think most important, you are training yourself to take the easy way out. I think this is different than 'working smart'. It's intellectual laziness, effectively choosing cheap calories rather than a nourishing meal, even if it takes longer to prepare. That effort is where good things, as well as your own growth, come from. Many days on here I feel like the last man alive who wants to actually read what you wrote. It's entirely possible that this is a losing battle and the nature of media and medium is trending in an irreversible way. But I really hope it's not. I'll leave you with a philosophical question: every social media platform is going to great lengths to label AI-generated images and video. Why not writing, as well?