I know this is gonna sound a little navel-gazesque from the jump, but yesterday I had something I’d written dismissed as the “work” of an LLM. According to their comment, the reader saw a bunch of emdashes up-front and bailed on the rest of the article. If you can believe it, this was the first such comment I’ve gotten, despite the hundreds of thousands of words — and almost as many emdashes, case in point — that I’ve written over the past few years. I won’t link to it here because I wouldn’t want anyone piling onto a thread on an unrelated post, and because I don’t really fault the person for saying it; leave 'em be.
For one thing, I do use too many emdashes. Listen, I read a bunch of Kerouac a long time ago. I don’t apologize for the emdashes; I do apologize for my reading habits back when I was twenty-mumble years old, but that’s only semi-related.
Mostly though, I don’t fault them for the impulse that drives that kind of comment. Hell, I agree with it: generated text, assembled by nobody and increasingly for nobody, should be dismissed. Even leaving aside the lack of craft, dubious accuracy, and insultingly cloying and sycophantic tones: why should anyone care about reading something nobody cared enough to write? If a publication is willing to pad itself out with the prose equivalent of Circus Peanuts — to take you, the reader, for an easy mark — I agree that you should hold them in lower esteem, if not outright scorn. If I thought I was being tricked into eating a meal stretched with sawdust, I’d be left feeling angry and dismissive of the meal, chef, and restaurant too. I’ve been there — reading-wise, I mean, not eating-wise. I know that “hah, gotcha; they’ll never put one over on me” feeling. It feels ~good to catch on to the fact that you’re being tricked, the way it feels ~good to prod at an aching tooth. It could be that I’ve been wrong about it before too — I bet I have been, but I’ll never know. I can’t know, by design.
The only “advancement” in generative AI, since its inception, has been in slowly getting better at fooling us into thinking its output isn’t generative AI. It is software designed to put strings in the most statistically likely order that an average human would. It is meant to trick us, at its core; an engine with “passable sentence” as its sole ideal output. Why else would it make us so angry? Why else would so many of us want to lash out at the sight of it, whether real or imagined? Why else would we “boo” these hollow-eyed, out-of-touch ghouls that try to advertise their “AI” investments during commencement speeches? Hell yeah; good. Send a message — call it out for what it is, and dismiss it loudly and in no uncertain terms.
Which is how my work got dismissed. It stung — it stings, sure — I mean, c’mon, same team — but I get it. I really do. I mean, look at the start of this paragraph, which I’m now refusing to go back and edit for illustrative purposes. Hell, I’m starting to suspect me a little. Emdashes have come to represent the big glowing weak point on the boss monster that threatens to consume the livelihood of so many of us; something recognizable, from a hundred paces, as a sign that something is dismissable. Of course we’re gonna attack it on sight. I also want to take a swipe at the grey goo threatening to smother both the web that I’ve worked so hard to build and the career I’ve been so fortunate to have.
But my second reaction, after the flash of “the robots can have my emdashes when they pry them from my cold, dead hands” anger and just a whisper of “what’s the point of even writing” was that I’m privileged in that I can shrug this off. I am established — I’m here, and you’re reading this now, for some wild reason. I’m “a long time out from reading Kerouac,” as we emdashers of a certain age call it — forty-mumble years old, nearly half of which was spent here, doing this. I’ve done a lot of writing over a lot of years, and I’ve been fortunate enough to get it in front of a lot of people. I’m not the thing that gets us out of this mess. I can’t be.
These tools, to the extent they can or should ever be personified, want rid of me pretty bad — but not half as badly as they want to prevent another one of me from ever happening again. The explicit goal of generative AI is to fill the role of “junior-level” everything the way insulating spray-foam in a car’s exhaust pipe might help prevent excessive engine noise. This technology exists to keep entry-level workers pruned all the way back to the roots, in the interest of keeping wages low, employment tenuous, staff nervous, and the unfathomably rich insulated from the potential financial repercussions of destroying countless lives. If you can never advance beyond “press the button, generate the thing,” you’re as replaceable as the next person — if there’s nothing beyond entry-level experience, they’ll never have to pay you more than an entry-level salary. They’ll destroy you, me, the web, the environment — anything but their valuations — to finally realize their long-held dream of “entry level position, five years of experience required.”
That’s why I’ve been writing so much more lately. That’s why I spun up this blog, finally, for-realsies, as small as its voice is. That’s why I’ve been trying to eke out more of a living writing courses and articles and picking fights about web standards, a thing I swore I would never do again, despite that being exceptionally difficult to do in this climate; despite the constant, crushing discouragement — a topic for another post altogether.
I’m doing this because I also want to take a swipe at these garbage machines, and this is the only infinitesimally small way that I think I could: by helping people to learn and improve out of spite for the people who’ve foisted these machines upon us, and would see the world burn to fuel them. I want us to want more — more than “press the button to generate the thing,” more than a life of “junior-level.” I want to chip at the wall they’re trying to build between you and “more.” I want new voices sharing what they know and what they’re learning — they’re doing so against unfathomable odds, in a climate far more difficult than things were back when I first clawed my way here. I’m barely hanging on here, and again: easiest difficulty setting. Don’t risk making things even harder for them.
For anyone stumbling on this thread, this post unequivocally [was not generated by an LLM], either in whole or in part. I do not use LLMs, full stop.
Now, whether or not you personally believe that is your business. What I would ask you to do, though, is imagine that an author might be someone that bristles every bit as much as you do at the idea of technical writing — something they do professionally, for personal fulfillment, or both — being systemically devalued by these tools. Imagine then having their work dismissed as slop; imagine the kind of “why bother” message that would send to an author less established than I am. Imagine your comment on a junior developer’s proud first post.
I agree that you shouldn’t value generated text. You don’t have to value my writing either, honestly — plenty don’t, I’m sure. But if you value real, human writing the way I think you do, I’d ask you to please be more careful about dismissing it as the very thing trying to rob it of value. I’m not going anywhere, but a brand new voice might, and we need those desperately right now.
I know you’re angry; I am too. I know you want better for us too — don’t let that anger risk silencing new voices, though. Don’t let it make you think that you’ve stumbled onto some secret, glandular instinct that makes you — and you alone — immune to something specifically engineered — to the tune of trillions of dollars — to trick you. Do not risk silencing even one new voice — our only way through this mess — just to take an easy and self-satisfying swing at a switch statement that can’t hear you anyway. Some of us just write this way.
There are real people deserving of that anger. Save it for them. Make sure they’re the ones that hear it. Say it to their faces as you climb over them.