“Could an LLM write your diary for you?”—That’s the question I want to ask to all those AI evangelists out there.
Whenever I check LinkedIn since opening my account three months ago, I’m bombarded with posts on AI eating everything. It’s annoying to the point that I’m now writing a post myself.
The key issue: Meaningful texts are artifacts that document human experience. They are part of our social world.
There is no point in an AI generating diary entries for you—because the purpose of such an entry is *your* thought process around it. You materialize your experiences and document them for future-you. You might also share the text on some social media site or blog. There, the audience cares about it because they care about you. The human can’t be taken out of the mix.
What is true for diary entries also applies to most genres of meaningful writing. A text that is generated without human experience is just bullshit. An LLM can’t think or experience in your place.
LLMs are great at speeding up many good things like search-heavy workflows, copy editing, translations and the like. And they are even better at plagiarism and at creating bullshit texts.
At the moment, this leads to more bullshit texts out there, and the AI grifters seem to aim for this to become the new standard of text production. But my faint hope is that now that it’s become trivial to draft bullshit texts, humanity might move beyond this genre of text altogether. 🤞
