Re: On AI-enhanced Writing

This post is in response to On AI-enhanced Writing. Pablo goes into a point by point critique of Arun Venkatesan's post, Ai-enhanced writing process [sic].

I know I have a minority opinion on this, but why not judge the thing that's produced instead of judging how it was produced? Only Arun can judge if what they've produced, with the help of whatever tools and technologies they choose, hits the mark of what was intended and if they're happy with the output.

It's one thing to say a certain workflow for writing doesn't work for each of us in our own personal writing. But this is an exercise to try to determine how much AI use is too much AI use when trying to come up with anti-AI policies.

There have been lazy, bad writers way before AI entered the chat. I think it's a mistake to categorically consider all AI-assisted writing/code/whatever as 'slop'. Could Arun's writing be better if they went to school, pursued an education that heavily emphasized writing as a skill and practiced all the techniques that Pablo considers to be part of the writing process? Maybe, but that's just, like, his opinion, man.

Pablo's response feels a bit like gatekeeping in my mind, and I see it often in these discussions. Good writers and developers don't like that other people are not putting in the hard work and time to learn how to be better writers or developers.

But to bring all this back to my point: disallow content from lazy, bad writers because the writing produced is lazy and bad, not because AI was used in some way to help.