I don't care whether my favorite author sweated for months facing a typewriter, of he effortlessly dictated the final form of the book in one sitting to a secretary while sipping mojitos.

I think my issue with AI has more to do with the signal it sends: reading takes effort, particularly literature, and I use the author's name as a proxy to judge whether to invest that effort myself. Nothing bad in selling dollar store crap, but it's bad to put 'Nike' on it.

Your individuality is what you sell as an author. I can get access to the LLM without you.

I want to read code by Abrash, Peyton Jones and Karpathy, not Claude's output based on a prompt from a third rater.

If you send me AI generated writing, I will have my AI agent read it and respond to it.

Meanwhile I will use my limited human time to engage with humans and human created content.

My line is clear, if you use copy paste the AI output that's not your writing. I am okay with AI collaboration - it detects the errors, you decide what to do with them.

But I'm not ashamed to say that I used it last week in a chat conversation with a recruiter to turn this:

    1. I just said I'm hard of hearing and prefer text.
    2. If it's only two minutes you can darn well send email.

    As I mentioned, I'm hard of hearing and phone calls are difficult for me —
    I find I miss things and it's frustrating for both sides. If it's just a
    couple of minutes' worth of information, an email works great and I can
    give you a thoughtful response. Happy to go from there!

If it makes James Bach think I'm a liar, that's a price I'm willing to pay.

It is very common to see that any interesting thought gets immediately tagged like AI slop and the real AI slop wins. Try an A/B test and you shall see that AI actually wins because of the people who hate AI. Most people cannot distinguish between a human and a AI written post and yet those same people want to be judgemental. And the people who are against AI and say "its just the next token generator and I don't use it" and yet use autocomplete on their mobiles are just duplicit. And yes AI is the next-token-generator, we have no proof that most humans were not brainwashed to become the same.

Their arguments are mostly addressed by proper, clear attribution. "My sister helped with my homework essay" deserves distrust withour further clarification.

Comparing LLM usage to lying is a fun perspective, but most of the lying happens in attribution. Their moral against lying also seems silly.

Because in his view, if you use AI and don't disclose it, you're a liar. And if you use AI and disclose it, he won't trust you anyway.

If one uses the first person in one’s writing, it follows that the words are their own.

Anything else is disingenuous.

> If AI deeply collaborates with you to write something, why am I saying you shouldn’t say you used AI? Because all I have is your word for it that you did any work at all.

So using author's logic, I should not trust them when they say they never use AI for writing, because all we have is their word.

> “I’m a skilled liar. I frequently tell lies. But don’t worry, I wouldn’t lie to you!”

Interesting how saying you used any amount of AI instantly labels you as "a skilled liar" to the author.

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