Writing in the age of AI

Alright this is a small one, and I am guilty of feeling this myself at some point in time.

Why do I need to write ?

AI pukes out whatever you ask about.

What’s the point ? Why even try ?

This feeling extends beyond just writing btw.

So this is something I am writing for myself, to convince my self why should I write about things that matter to me.

Come back here if you ever doubt that its not worth writing about the things you are learning, and if someone tells you AI can do it better.

I feel bad about writing this partly given that I feel if I show some of my technical articles to anyone, the obvious response would be either I have used AI or it does not even matter coz AI can just do it better than what I have done.

So there is a real tax of AI on human ingenuity, alright it’s a given that I maybe not doing something that is not done before, or even done better by some other human beings that came before me, but I am trying to learn, I don’t want credit for it, but at the very least don’t shrug it off as meaningless ?

These AI CEOs, keep telling us that AI will solve all the problems, I don’t believe them at all, this AI revolution thing, is nothing less than an industrial revolution, but it also does not warrant equality of outcome or even merit driven outcomes, those who have big money will gain access to most advanced versions of AI and build with it, and even though many people will have access to these tools, they will still lack the knowledge on how to use it to actually make their lives better.

Think of Gregor Samsa in Metamorphosis. His family valued him around while he paid the bills. The moment he stopped being useful, they locked him up in a room and he dies quietly. Once he dies, the family is relieved.

I don’t know if the developers will suffer the same fate as Gregor, but in this world, value comes from what you produce, that is what AI is getting good at producing.

You have something they cannot take

Your own internalized understanding, unless these AI companies are trying to develop a probe to stick in your head to somehow understand how you learn, but until then you have that.

To build your own internalized understanding, you have to build things of your own making with its warts and imperfections, and there is no easy way around it.

I would say use AI / LLMs if you need help getting there, yes that’s right I don’t resent it, I only resent the idea that somehow LLMs are producing something so you should not even think to build that yourself, that is something I would call giving up on your chance to build knowledge in whatever capacity you were capable of. Don’t do that.

A better example of this is just so simple that anyone could understand it,

No one ever said swimming is a solved problem, looking at 23 olympic gold medals of Michael Phelps

So to my doubting mind I say,

“Do it because you want to and for the process, since the act of doing it matters more, rather than outcome itself, because it will build enough strength and muscles to try and overcome problems down the line.”

That said, why writing matters to me?

It makes me think in structure, or rather structure what I am already thinking about, its a story I tell along with my own memories recorded around the task, humans forget and memories are reconstructed over and over, writing these posts are like a checkpoint for me, I have wished that I built early on.

And I say there is a strong personal evidence of building up on things, while building wc I decided to iterate on buffer stream at byte level, now that knowledge was recorded in a post, which I could use again for my next project json-parser, and this will repeat many more times, where I need to process any kind of data efficiently from a stream by reading from it.

AI will always give me what I ask for, building and writing will give me understanding and checkpoints, and I own those.

Building becomes how I think. Blogs / Posts become a self referential points to look up what,how and why I did.

So, your writing should matter to you the most. Its fine to have an audience but it’s not completely necessary.