People who rarely wrote are now producing AI-generated design proposals, business plans, documentation, presentations, tickets, pull requests, blog articles, and meeting summaries. It is all unreadable. AI helps me write better and faster, but I’m fed up with reading almost anything written by AI. In this essay, I want to express my frustration and describe how I’m finding value in AI for writing.

AI Is Terrible for Writing. A pattern: people use AI to build something new, then use AI to retrospectively summarize what they built into a design document. Reading such a document isn’t just difficult—it is punishing. The design document is no longer a proposal to build consensus, bring people along, and refine ideas through slow, deliberate thinking—it is a summary made by a machine, in exhausting detail, without context or perspective. It is unreadable. Inhumane. The authors become impatient when people aren’t engaged, and it is hard not to be, because the thing they built is already working.[1]

I also see pull request summaries clearly written by machines for machines. They are rich in detail: this was changed to that, these were split, those were merged, this was left untouched, tests were added for this, and so on. But I’m left asking: Why are we doing this? What is the value? How risky or urgent is this work? Where do you want my input? What should I pay attention to? The same goes for tickets or meeting summaries made by AI. The writing, like more and more of the world, consists of statements outside of context.

I had someone write me a personal message about a sensitive topic that was clearly workshopped with AI to nuance the conversation and not offend me. But the message became impersonal, dispassionate, and disjointed. It had all the parts, but it didn’t make sense as a whole. I wasn’t interested in reading it, or responding. I would much rather someone be themselves and write with their own voice, or with some passion, even if they can’t quite find the words, or risk offending me. In relationships with others, there is vulnerability and risk. In communicating with your AI, there is none, and attempts to eliminate vulnerability and risk will eliminate the process of relationship itself. As Simon Sarris writes in Resist Summary, an essay I keep returning to: I think one should write as much as they can with their own empiricism, their own senses, giving the reader their own characterization of life or events.—Simon Sarris, Resist Summary

Perhaps the laziest and most offensive use of AI writing I have seen: I had someone use AI to summarize my comments on their proposal as their response to me! Thanks! I couldn’t have said it better myself![2]

I Don’t Have the Context You Do. Cynthia Dunlop recently shared survey results on reading AI-written articles entitled Report: How developers react to AI-scented blog posts. For the majority of readers, if they think an article is AI-assisted or AI-authored, they will stop reading (78%) and avoid the author in the future (71%). As Bryan Cantrill wrote about this research in his essay The revolt of the reader: “our brains pull an LLM-triggered ejection handle, bailing us out mid-sentence in an act of self-preservation.” The strongest result in the survey was people overwhelmingly preferred the author’s own writing (98%), with all its flaws and idiosyncrasies, as compared to a soulless rewrite by an AI. Writing authentically is one of the best ways to connect with people. It reminds me of a comment Bjarne Stroustrup, the creator of C++, made during a panel discussion I attended over a decade ago on writing books: When I read a book, I really feel that if I can hear the author’s voice ringing in my head—complete with weird accents and peculiarities of their speaking patterns—then I feel like something has succeeded. If it feels like dry,...