I think some people get confused that I teach two opposing skills: the traditional art of writing vs using Gen AI to churn out content. Ah, but life is about contradictions.
Take this post for example. I am writing this while feeling a little drained after being woken up at 545am by a false fire alarm at my HDB apartment block. The alarm blared for over 15 minutes before I dragged myself out of bed and took the lift down to see what the problem was.
I was surprised to see three fireman at the void deck. One of them told me they couldn’t break the lock to the pump room (where the alarm buzzer resided) as there was no actual fire, and thus they were not allowed to destroy public property (a stupid padlock).
I thanked them for coming down and went back to my apartment to start my day. I checked my email and the daily Kindle deals email told me there was an interesting book going for $1.99 (How To Write Like A Writer, Thomas Foster). I skimmed through the free library copy of the book, found it excellent, and purchased it. Buying good books on extreme discounts always makes me happy. Then I started writing this post.
Now, Gen AI couldn’t write this post because it doesn’t sleep or get annoyed at being woken up early. It also cannot ponder like a human. The original para of this post was “I don’t want a relationship with a robot. So, please don’t use Gen AI to automate your comments on my posts, or I will block you.” But that sounded too angry.
I came up with a new lead and my writing engine began to warm up. I went with the flow, only pausing to delete unnecessary words so I wouldn’t contradict my own teaching (“Write concisely!!” I thundered to my class yesterday).
I come to the end of my post, and it’s been 45 minutes since I started writing. Too much time taken, you say? This is what real writing is about – taking your time to think and put down your words.
Gen AI is good for automating content that we don’t really want to read (eg. answering repeated customer queries over email, writing a boring boss’ internal message to staff that he doesn’t really mean, etc) and that’s good.
But if you think that Gen AI can help you write original content, you are badly mistaken. The fact that you have read to this point means that my writing has done its job to keep you reading to my final sentence:
Please don’t use Gen AI to automate your comments on my posts, or I will block you.
(This was written for the LinkedIn audience.)
(Sleepy Siamese cat generated by Midjourney)