"You have to put your body into your writing".

"You have to put your body into your writing".

A long time ago before I came to tech, I wanted to work in the creative industry and I was assistant to an editor. He was toxic in many ways and I ended up running away from him, but that advice from him still stays with me.

He said he could immediately tell when somebody copy-pasted text and stitched it together because he didn’t see themselves inside the writing.

Obviously you cannot put your body into writing, but you probably understand what it means, especially if you are tired of reading AI slop everyday. You have to use your own words when you write. Your writing has to be you. You cannot do it unless you really understand what you write. Every sentence. Every word.

I often struggle to express my thoughts in English and I'm very slow to write. I was very excited to learn that AI could generate “high quality” text easily, but after making many mistakes, I realized that it just doesn’t work. Sure it can help me improve my writing in some ways, but if I let AI write everything, I don’t see myself in the writing and somehow it’s very hard to make it mine from there.

Also writing is not just about the outcome but the process. It slows you down in a good way. It helps you iterate on an idea and think deeper about a topic.

I recently spent several hours hand-writing an explanation for a complex bug that I had fixed using AI. I had to go back to the code again and again to make sure I understood the fix myself. This took me a lot of time but I felt it's worth it, because anybody can now understand the issue by just reading my description.

Everyone talks about how much time you can save by using AI, but we also need to talk about what we lose. How much time do we lose everyday by being forced to read AI slop? And when someone keeps sending you slop, how much trust do you lose in them?

We write at work because we want to help other people understand an issue. Let’s write something that is easy to read, easy to understand, and actually helpful and useful. Your writing has to be you, not AI.