I enjoy flicking through Substack Notes of a morning, looking for an essay I might enjoy. Occasionally I’ll find something like ‘Light Travels at the Highest Possible Velocity’, a Sherman Alexie story I read one Sunday morning in bed which delayed my getting up by an hour.
It’s one of the best things I’ve read this year, and I found it by accident and read it for free.
Thanks Sherm.
And then, I got suckered, I think, by this tasty piece of clickbait: 8 Japanese Zen Practices That Will Rewire Your Daily Life. I mean, the clickiness of the bait in that headline…
What was I thinking? I was probably thinking… Zen? I like Zen! And… I wouldnt mind rewiring my life. So I read it and I kind of enjoyed it, and I even learned a bit from it. I really liked Practice Number 7, Isshōkenmei, ‘Give your whole self to what you do.’ It had a cool samurai story to illustrate the point, and what am I if not a cool but frustrated keyboard samurai, cruelly denied my true path of swishing out my sword and cutting motherfuckers who get on my bad side every day?
Anyway, I was going to restack the post, when I remembered the beef I got into with some chode on Notes, who’d dropped into my TL to tell me another post I’d enjoyed and shared (this one on brain health) was just AI slop.
I reacted pretty poorly to the driveby, partly because I’d really enjoyed the piece and I rated it as good advice because I’d been following a lot of it for the last few years and could confirm it really helps.
Did the author, a doctor, use an AI to help him write it? I dont know. But I doubt it. I doesn’t feel generated to me. Did he use an AI to frame or edit the piece, however… Maybe. But I don’t really care. Doctors aren’t writers. I wouldn’t expect one to have the narrative or discursive skills of a Sherman Alexie. My opinion, I decided, was that I didn’t give a shit if I thought the piece was a good read and useful enough to share.
Which brings me back around to that 8 Zen things bit.
I enjoyed it when I read it, after just waking up, a bit groggy and uncaffeinated. So I saved it, meaning to share it later. But when I came back to it, possibly feeling a bit tender from the driveby argument, I looked at it again. And yeah, unlike the doctor’s essay, this did look kinda botty. It’s got all the AI tells. The super short one and two line pars. The chopped, sentence fragments. The repeated repetition.
And yet, I did enjoy it the first time I read it. And the content is kind of useful and of interest to me. But I’m not gonna share it on Notes now. I thought I’d just link to it here and ask what everyone thinks about these essays or posts that feel much more obviously AI generated, but still kind of engaging and useful.
My gut feeling is that I dont give a shit if anyone, especially a non-writer, uses an AI to help frame and edit their own arguments. Honestly, it’s gonna make most of them more readable. But I’m less sanguine about people calling themselves writers who are really just prompting a bot to generate copy and then throwing it out there without much intervention. But then how much intervention makes it worth reading?
I honestly don’t know.