When AI Eloquence Makes Words Feel...Empty
Some rambling thoughts on….rambling thoughts
There’s an odd irony brewing in my world. As someone who lives and breathes language, I should be ecstatic about the rise of AI writing tools, right? And don't get me wrong, the capabilities are mind-blowing. But lately, I've found myself grappling with a strange sense of unease. It's like the easier it becomes to generate eloquent prose with AI, the more I crave the raw, unfiltered essence of human expression.
It hit me the other night at a team dinner. My coworker was celebrating a work anniversary, and I'd written her a heartfelt message in a commemorative slide deck. I found myself telling her, half-jokingly, that the message was special because I wrote it, every word, without AI assistance.
The joke landed, but it also made me realize how much my relationship with language has shifted.
The Curse of Fluff and the Quest for a Unique Voice
One issue is the sheer volume of words AI tends to generate. It's like these models have a built-in "fluff" function that kicks in even when I'm aiming for conciseness. Don't get me wrong, eloquence has its place, but in a world saturated with information, I find myself valuing brevity and precision more than ever.
Then there's the challenge of generic output. Yes, expert personas and few-shot prompting can help, but they require time and mental energy – two things I don't always have in abundance. This often leaves me staring at AI-generated text that feels eerily bland, sprinkled with telltale words and phrases that scream "artificial." (The word "electric," for instance, just doesn't hit the same way anymore.)
The AI-Assisted Writer: A Different Kind of Collaboration
Most of my writing now starts with a brain dump of some sort. Sometimes it's a messy first draft, other times it's a stream-of-consciousness voice memo recorded on a walk. From there, I turn to AI to help me hone, refine, and shape those raw thoughts into something coherent.
With written drafts, it's easy to see the evolution of an idea – to track the edits, the rewrites, the moments where AI helped me find a better turn of phrase. But voice memos? They exist in a different realm. Once they're processed by the AI, they become these black boxes of information. I know the essence of what I said is in there somewhere, but the nuances, the tangents, the half-formed whispers of inspiration – those remain hidden within the audio.
It makes me wonder: what gems am I missing? As AI models become even more sophisticated, will they be able to unearth insights from my past ramblings that current technology overlooks? A part of me wants to hoard those voice memos, convinced they hold untapped creative potential. But then I remember the relentless march of time, the ever-growing to-do list. The archive of my spoken thoughts expands, and I'm left with a strange mix of curiosity and resignation, pondering the vast unknown within my own words.
A Longing for My AI Scribe: A Model That Truly Gets Me
The dream, of course, is an AI model so attuned to my voice that it feels like an extension of my own mind. An AI scribe that understands my quirks, my style, my tendency to overuse em dashes – and translates all of that into prose that feels authentically me. Until then, the dance between human expression and AI assistance continues, a fascinating, and sometimes unsettling, exploration of language in the age of intelligent machines.