AI writing
Prose a model wrote: what gives it away, what it does to reading, and whether anyone should publish it.
FilterEveryone, all time64 from 45 people
- MG
Molly Graham quoted
Co-founder of Glue Club and The Guild
Their wordsCEOs like shipping a strategy memo that was clearly written by AI that is you role modeling for your organization that it's fine to outsource your thinking and it's fine to outsource your strategy.
↗Molly Graham: The grief, burnout, and opportunity hiding inside the AI transitionyoutube.com 10th of 20 in this recording
- 1 day earlier
- GR
Guillermo Rauch quoted
CEO of Vercel; creator of Next.js and Socket.IO
Their wordsWe run a real risk that *reading* gets entirely discounted, because of the exhaustion of getting low-quality and unverified AI prose being thrown at you all the time.
- 2 days earlier
- ZM
Zvi Mowshowitz quoted
Writes Don't Worry About the Vase
Their wordsThe average person finds AI writing appealing because they rarely read, and they have not been inundated with AI writing patterns optimized to look good to them.
- SA
Scott Alexander quoted
Essayist; writes Astral Codex Ten
Their wordsThere’s probably an informal taboo on true neuralese with no chain of thought at all, but it’s a complicated technology with multiple moving parts, there’s no agreement as to which moving part the taboo is on, and without that agreement, some of the parts might slip through the cracks.
- 3 days earlier
- SA
Scott Alexander quoted
Their wordsI think there’s a general understanding that using AI in what is at least partly a writing contest is against the spirit of the exercise.
- 1 day earlier
- JS
John Scalzi quoted
American science fiction novelist (Old Man's War
Their wordsno, I don't think AI will keep me from hitting any of these anniversaries as a working writer, unless it triggers the apocalypse, in which case we have other problems.
↗50th Anniversaries and When I’ll Hit Themwhatever.scalzi.com 2nd of 2 in this piece
- 1 day earlier
- CM
Craig Mod quoted
Writer, photographer and software maker based in Japan
Their wordsIn this age of algorithmic recommendations and smooth-brained AI speak, triviality is everywhere. We are awash in load-bearing triviality. Our bulwark against triviality is to applaud someone improbable.
↗[RIDGELINE] Walking with Anniecraigmod.com 2nd of 2 in this piece
- 3 days earlier
- ZH
Zach Holman quoted
Web developer and writer; an early GitHub employee
Their wordsNo real fucking human being talks like that. In fact, I think that might be the only remaining Turing test we have left.
↗As Someone Who Has Written This Blog Post,zachholman.com 2nd of 2 in this piece
- 1 day earlier
- ML
Michael Lopp quoted
Engineering manager who has worked at Apple, Netscape
Their wordsGood writing captures voice. Good writing documents how another human thinks.
↗Robots Have No Voicerandsinrepose.com 2nd of 2 in this piece
- 1 day earlier
- AR
Armin Ronacher quoted
Creator of Flask and Jinja
Their wordsif you rely on an LLM to give your text structure, it will score badly on Pangram even if you do plenty of edits over it.
- 3 days earlier
- DT
Derek Thompson quoted
Writer and podcaster; co-author of Abundance with Ezra…
Their wordsArtificial intelligence has unleashed a torrent of cheating on campus and created chaos in the job application process, as both students and employers use large language models: the former, to write hundreds of AI-assisted applications; the latter, to screen those AI-written applications with AI-written filters, thus removing from the process of finding a first job those procedural frictions sometimes known as "people."
↗Why Harvard's Dean 'Encourages' Students to Use AIderekthompson.org 2nd of 2 in this piece
- 1 day earlier
- CM
Craig Mod quoted
Our readingAI-generated text lacks the human mind and knowability that make writing feel worth reading.
Their wordsAI-generated text doesn't have this knowability. It has legibility (sometimes), of course, but the source is unknown, there is no "mind," and that's what gives us the ick.
↗[RODEN] Writing in 2026, Walking Europecraigmod.com 1st of 3 in this piece
- KD
Katie Dill quoted
Head of Design at Stripe
Their wordsAI makes things feel finished really really fast all too often prematurely.
↗How to scale intent, quality, and artistry with Al | Katie Dill (Stripe) (Lenny & Friends Summit, San Francisco, 10 September 2026)youtube.com 2nd of 12 in this recording
- 5 days earlier
- BV
Ben Vinegar quoted
Co-founder of Modem, and before it VP of Engineering at Sentry
Their wordswhat a PR review of AI code looks like for me: 1) does it do anything remotely dangerous 2) does it touch files I would reasonably expect it to 3) do the tests cover the expected behaviour 4) does it follow architecture convention 5) [spot check code for slop]
- 4 days earlier
- GO
Gergely Orosz quoted
Writes The Pragmatic Engineer
Their wordsThe reason for this hardline stance is that we believe in the value of human thought and experience, as told by people with first-hand knowledge. It’s also about the audience: The “audience” for AI-written code is usually a machine, whereas the writing in Pragmatic Engineer is for humans, by humans. AI produces a statistical average in its output which creates uniform, dull text that’s an inferior reading experience to human writing – at least today it is.
↗How software engineering is changing: an essay challengeblog.pragmaticengineer.com
- DT
Derek Thompson quoted
Their wordsThere is a good argument that AI writing will be as good as human writing, possibly even surpass human writing within the next decade.
↗We Can't Let AI Writing Take Over the Internetderekthompson.org 3rd of 3 in this piece
- 1 day earlier
- EM
Ethan Mollick quoted
Professor at Wharton studying how people actually use AI
Their wordsAIs don’t just repeat the same sentence patterns but also the same themes (memory is a favorite), names (Elara Voss, Marcus Chen), and underlying ideas.
- 4 days earlier
- GO
Gergely Orosz quoted
Their wordsDon't expect a response to an AI-written email, or a templated email. I get it, you think it's a numbers game: send a tweaked email out to 100 podcasts, and hope that at least one replies. In reality, by playing the same game as everyone else does, you are assisting to the noise, and end up drowning yourself in it as well.
- 3 days earlier
- AH
Ann Handley quoted
Wall Street Journal bestselling author on marketing and writing
Their wordsAI models can start to decay. The output (gross) starts to flatten. Sentences sound more repetitive. Boring.
↗Don’t Outsource This Part of Writingannhandley.com 1st of 2 in this piece
- AH
Ann Handley quoted
Our readingOriginal human-written text that has not been touched by AI is becoming increasingly valuable.
Their wordsAnyway, the bottom line is that human-written language reliably untainted by AI is becoming valuable.
↗Don’t Outsource This Part of Writingannhandley.com 2nd of 2 in this piece
- 5 days earlier
- ML
Michael Lopp quoted
Their wordsThe content for which you want this the most would be the responsibility of humans who are the least motivated to use such a system.
- AO
Addy Osmani quoted
Engineering leader and author who spent 14 years at Google
Their wordsnow that it is very easy for anyone to use an agent to create a body of text, I think it's more important than ever for us to make sure that the ideas we're putting out in the world are actually worth people reading.
↗From Chrome DevTools to AI Engineering, with Addy Osmaniyoutube.com 20th of 22 in this recording
- PG
Paul Graham quoted
Co-founder of Y Combinator and Viaweb
Their wordsI was thinking about how I recognize AI writing, and one big tell is excessively colorful verbs. A handful of journalists might write that a proposal "drew" 100 votes, but any normal person will just say "got".
- 4 days earlier
- SR
Sebastian Raschka quoted
AI research engineer working on large language models
Their wordsthe score is the classifier's estimated probability for the AI-generated class based on its training distribution. However, we shouldn't interpreted it as a general probability that the text was written by AI.
↗Building an AI Text Detector From Scratchmagazine.sebastianraschka.com 2nd of 2 in this piece
- 2 days earlier
- ML
Michael Lopp quoted
Their wordsHowever, this is a tone-deaf, clumsy, and alarming opening salvo in their watermark strategy.
- ML
Michael Lopp quoted
Their wordsMy writing is my work, and Anthropic's current strategy is aggressively writer-hostile.
- 1 day earlier
- NL
Nathan Lambert quoted
Machine-learning researcher on open language models
Their wordsSo, in 2-5 years I still expect the best textbooks to be heavily crafted by the human hand.
↗I wrote an AI textbook — how long until AI can do it better?interconnects.ai 3rd of 3 in this piece
- 3 days earlier
- BF
Brad Feld quoted
Co-founder of Foundry Group and of Techstars
Their wordsThe transgression isn't using the machine. It's hitting a button, not reading what comes back, and publishing it under your name.
↗The Argument Against AI Writing Is At Least 2,400 Years Oldfeld.com 2nd of 2 in this piece
- 13 days earlier
- AH
Ann Handley quoted
Their wordsYou can use AI without handing it the work you love doing, or the work that means something to you.
↗How To Secure More Speaking Gigsannhandley.com 1st of 2 in this piece
- 12 days earlier
- PW
Peter Woit quoted
Mathematician and Senior Lecturer in the Mathematics…
Our readingAI-generated junk papers risk overwhelming the hep-th physics field with worthless content.
Their wordsThe result is something completely worthless, but not obviously distinguishable from many other things on hep-th, which is in serious danger of going from something sad and unhealthy to something completely overwhelmed with crud.