When AI slop drowns out the signal in an endless sea of noise

The language models’ greatest feat is also their most significant drawback—by absorbing the personal voice from every piece of content they have ever encountered, they produce a whole bunch of nonspecific, generic, mean-reverting Whatever that manages to say much but convey very little. All it can ever be is a circumlocution machine. It won’t tell deeply embarrassing tales of its youth, wear its grudges on its sleeve, passionately hold an unpopular position, or tug at threads without knowing ahead of time what the other end might be attached to. It doesn’t wander off onto interesting tangents that bring the reader along on a little shared journey of discovery. It has no discernible soul, no passion for its work, no real ability to justify the screen space it has filled up—let alone the time and attention the reader is now giving it. We can tell when it’s genuine. God dammit, we can tell.

“Structuring your theory into a story makes it more compelling.”

The latter consequence of low expectations is the more serious one. It's something that some people may never recover from. The average career of a paramedic is 6-8 years because of the physical and psychological strain the job puts on a person. The career of a physiotherapist is about the same, mainly because they become someone's personal psychologist 8 times a day while treating back pain or a sore knee. The trajectory of a data or software engineer seems to be a bit different: they burn out from the mental stress of working in dishonest and fraudulent cultures that produce unsatisfying work, but the engineer stays in the profession. Only they're a shell of a human. How many developers or programmers do you know who are a little sad all the time? I wonder what caused them to be like that.

So much of building tech stuff is a figurative conversation - between you and the machine, you and the abstraction, you and the people who will use what you build, you and the people who will maintain it, you and those who came before you. To understand such a varied audience you need to anchor on your understanding of yourself. Improve the one tool you can never replace - you.