Reading and writing are interfaces. And AI can reduce their friction.

The useful part

The question is not whether AI reduces work, but where the intellectual work moves. Humans were producing shallow, derivative, formulaic, and poorly researched content long before most of us knew what an LLM was. What's becoming more tiresome than the slop itself, though, is the growing commentary treating any use of AI-assisted writing as an intellectual failure.

How it works

• Much of this criticism seems to rest on the shortsighted assumption that doing more of the writing manually necessarily makes the resulting work more intellectually valuable.
• The same assumption can shape how we judge reading, as though working through a text without assistance necessarily produces deeper understanding.
• Both judgments treat the difficulty involved in these processes as evidence of intellectual value.
• That treats all the layers of difficulty involved in reading and writing as if they were inherently valuable.
• Some are, of course, but others may simply be consequences of the interfaces through which we have learned to think and communicate.

What to take from it

That may seem like an odd claim because most people think of interfaces as screens, controls, or other points of interaction with technology.

Details worth keeping

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