This piece is an organizational mess, and almost nonsensical in places.
Was the person who wrote this thinking at all? (Did a person even write this?) This paragraph manages to say nothing, and with a distinct lack of skill, grace or apparent thought.This strange discussion has only a few precedents; it leads, as so many discussions about AI do, toward speculation about hilarious absurdities. Sometimes, these hilarious absurdities—talking computers, hundred-billion-dollar server farms—become reality much sooner than even the speculators imagined. Will the same happen here? I fear it might. Will it be bad? Certainly. Although: It’s just possible that writing for AI might not be quite as bad as “writing for AI” sounds.Sounds like a slightly less awful variation of Roko's Basilisk: appease the nascent machine intelligence in order to be revived as some kind of simulacrum. It's not much less ridiculous than the original.
As for "many smart people can't be wrong", many smart people believed in alchemy for centuries. Not a convincing argument.
> How do you get it to do this? For that, we turn to PR people, always in search of influence, who are developing a form of writing (press releases and influence campaigns are writing) that’s not so much search-engine-optimized as chatbot-optimized. It’s important, they say, to write with clear structure, to announce your intentions, and especially to include as many formatted sections and headings as you can.
Ok, so those horrible articles lately, full of axios-style micro sections and unnecessary emoji that I thought were obviously written by AI were instead written by humans, for AI?
The future is stupid.
>It’s enough to make us poor wordsmiths question our blessings.
I support AI replacing any professional writer who unironically refers to themselves as a wordsmith.