The idea that there will be a "middle class" that relies on AI to churn out missives without much thought scares me a lot more than having people who don't writ

The idea that there will be a "middle class" that relies on AI to churn out missives without much thought scares me a lot more than having people who don't write a lot, honestly. I'm seeing that happen today with corporate documents (there's always that one enthusiast in each team who says "oh, let me improve that with [LLM]", and it's a slog to go through pages and pages of things that could be a bullet point). Quality has been trumped by mediocre quantity, and the cluelessness of the people who do this willingly baffles me. As someone who's been writing pretty much constantly for over 30 years and both uses AI code completion to speed up first drafts (of code) but switches off everything except macOS's (pretty good) word completion for prose--and absolutely refuses to use AI to generate work documents or even my blog post drafts--this post was a bit of a "oh, so this would be the ultimate consequence of keeping all of it on" moment. Accelerating writing (with simple word completion) is fine. But letting the AI generate entire sentences or paragraphs (or even expand your draft's bullet points) will either have you stray from your original intent in writing or generate overly verbose banalities that only waste people's time. I use iA Writer to draft a lot of my stuff, and its style checks have helped a lot to remove redundancies, clichés and filler, making my prose a bit more cohesive and to the point. That's been around for ages and it's not LLM-style AI (more of a traditional grammar checker), but that sort of assistance seems to be missing from pretty much every AI "writing aid"--they just generate verbose slop, and until that is fixed in a way that truly helps a writer LLMs are just a party trick. Edit: I just realised that I wrote about this at length in February - https://taoofmac.com/space/blog/2024/02/24/1600#the-enshittification-of-writing https://taoofmac.com/space/blog/2024/02/24/1600#the-enshitti...