It Took You a Few Minutes to Read. It Took Me a Couple of Days to Write.
An essay like this takes you three or four minutes to read. Usually it takes me a couple of days to write, start to finish. A lot of that is back and forth with an AI, which helps me get my own thoughts onto the page.
A finished essay looks the same whether it took a couple of days or an afternoon. Nothing on the page tells you which.
Some of it is just getting the words down. I type with one finger, and a lot of the time I use speech to text. Dictation, on any system, isn’t nearly as good as the companies that make it want you to believe. Think about the last time you tried to send a text by voice. The further your speech is from average, the worse it gets. Mine isn’t average.
When I dictate, the software writes down its best guess at what I said. Writing comes out as riding. Exemption comes out as extension. The AI never hears my voice, only the guess. I read the guess to find out what the software heard, then fix whatever came out as some other sentence. Sometimes the fix is another round of dictation. Sometimes I type the correction myself, one letter at a time. And sometimes I’m in a hurry and hit enter before I’ve seen it, and the AI has to work out what I said.
The other night I took a survey inside the app I work in every day. It told people not to share personal information. I shared plenty, on purpose, because I wanted whoever read my answers to know I’m not an average user, and what an AI could learn from someone like me. I dictated my answers the way I always do.
The AI running the survey was a version of the one I work with every day, minus the months of context. Those months are how the AI I work with every day figures out what I said when the software heard something else. It knows my projects, the people in my life, and the way I talk. The survey AI knew none of that. When the way you get words out is limited, context is everything. How well these systems work matters more to someone like me than to someone who can type eighty words a minute.
The other part is deciding. Somebody has to decide what the essay is about, what stays in, what comes out, and whether it still sounds like me when it’s done. Every writer does those jobs.
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I don’t like the phrase “AI slop.” Slop is what you get when nobody puts in the time.
A year ago, I couldn’t have spent the energy this takes. With an AI that knows me, I can.
