This is not a new story. The web is showered with developers telling tales on the downward leg of their flight to the AI sun - wax and feathers in tow. I never saw much reason to care. My code has alway just needed to be ‘good enough’. The linear-algebra-animatron knows packages that I don’t. It has ingested the docs along with code from someone who actually knows how to use it. My ‘good enough’ is far easier to get to now than in the before-times - for small projects at least. While it is not a new story, it is a new story for me. This blog post details the worm in my brain that has eaten all of my ability to write. The blog itself is my attempt to remove it.

I found the worm when I asked the clever machine to write me a cover note for a job application. Jenson’s alchemical boxes spooled up and spunked out… a cover note. It did the same ‘good enough’ as it had for my code. Shamefully, I will admit that there have been applications for jobs, the kind that I didn’t particularly want to get, where this level got a passing mark. With less shame, I will also admit that I have questioned the usefulness of cover notes in the first place. In any case, I always knew that I could write a more compelling account of myself than the machine - but then I would be the one tasked with writing it. Only when I found a job that I actually wanted did the “delve”s, “hone”s, “!”s, and “eager”s bother me enough to do something about it. I sounded like the machine, or even worse, an enthusiastic American. I set aside time to bring the cover note equivalent of “jock asks doting girl to prom” into existence. ‘I am hot shit and I want you’. And when the time came, nothing. I summoned a phantom limb to action in my time of need and fell flat on my face. What was there once is no longer. I was disgusted.

I’m not saying that I was once Joyce reincarnate, but I was able to make a decent fist at representing my thoughts on paper. The source of the disgust might be more that I was sleep-walking on the upward part of my flight to the AI sun. Every time I asked the computer to, for example, ‘Give me 1000 words on why Lady Gaga’s ‘Abracadabra’ is not an indicator of recession but actually confirmation that we are in the mania phase of the market cycle’, I was outsourcing work to the lowest bidder. The cost of creating text is the time it takes to write the prompt, and importantly, not the cost of reading it. That is a problem for whoever you send it to. Text has never been so cheap to produce - how can I justify doing it myself?

A friend of mine has a travel blog. Updates come once every couple of weeks detailing where in the world he is, the food he’s eating, and any other tidbits or incidentals he deems worth including. The friend is unnamed because I’m going to talk shit about him here for a sec. The posts are so poorly written in such a distinct style with an anti-structure stream of consciousness that perhaps suggest this lad to be the modern Joyce we are seeking. His writing says that not even the advice of spell check was heeded - let alone the thinking machines. I love reading his updates. Beyond getting his news, it is clear that the words were expensive to produce. With the cost of producing text being so low, the cost of consuming it has risen. Writing that has come from someone’s brain seems to me to be a wonderful way of signaling that is of worth. I am not suggesting to those better at writing than me and my friend that throwing in a couple of typos is a good idea. A coherent style that is distinct from the machine’s or cogence in argument alone is enough to tell the reader that your work has come from a real person. Another effort at signaling is to say it straight out as the folks at brainmade.org suggest.

The cover note was annoying because I thought it would be an opportunity to signal competence and how much I wanted the gig. Instead I discovered atrophy to a muscle I had always been quietly proud of. The cliche of ‘use it or lose it’ is tired. I got pretty far into this piece without employing a muscle metaphor. As I said at the top, this is not a new story. Many before me have learned that there are hidden costs to outsourcing your thinking. I, like those at brainmade, am not anti AI. I do think that the cons of reliance on it are not well understood yet. This is an exercise in worm extraction. A search for the cure to grey matter scrambled egg. Keep an eye out for me among the falling developers with their cautionary tales. Add these words to the heap. This blog is likely not worth reading, but I am hopeful it will be worth writing.

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