Give Us Your Taste
AI is incredible. But you know what’s more incredible? Thoughtful human interaction. When a human writes, there’s an entire world behind every choice of word. Every inclusion or exclusion is a choice. Good writing transfers an idea from one head to another. It’s magic.
Increasingly we’re seeing heartless AI slop throughout our digital space. Slack messages, emails, Jira tickets, code, specs, plans. Written by AI that mushed together something that “looks like an opinion”, but actually wasn’t deliberately selected by the human who pasted it. I see a doc, dive in to try to understand, provide comments and suggestions, try and help sharpen the thought behind it – only to realize I’m just talking to Claude. I’m the first human to actually read this.
I’m tired of talking to AI. I want to talk to real people. But even when I talk to people, they forward my questions to AI and send me the AI’s answer.
I get the urge. Fight it. By all means, use AI to express yourself and to sharpen your thought. Don’t reduce yourself to a copy-paste operator, you’re not here for that.
We want your taste. Your deliberate choices. You have agency to drive us forward, don’t pass it on to a numb machine. When we create things, they are valuable because of the human intent embedded into them.
Intent is usually inseparably embedded into the form of the artifact. A human iteratively (sometimes painstakingly) shapes and reshapes their creation until it sufficiently matches what’s in their mind’s eye. The odd thing about generative AI is that it can produce substantial form with minimally applied intent. A human can show up to a task with an unclear mental model of what they mean to accomplish, and an AI can generate something anyway. “Write a letter of resignation for me to send to my boss.” “Hmm…I guess that looks good.”
