It's Not Bad Because It's AI... It's Bad Because it's Bad

Someone on my team sent me an update last week. Long. Structured. Read like a McKinsey deck.

I told them I didn't want to read it.

It was AI vomit… they they didn’t check.

One sentence came back: "Yeah, everything's good (one sentence update), sorry”

That's the one I wanted.

Here's the thing about AI and writing. Using it isn't the crime. I use it constantly (you should be too).

The crime is pasting a prompt into a doc, not reading what comes out, and sending it to your boss as proof you did something.

Rather than saying stop using AI or always use AI or whatever, I’m now just judging what I’m send by the quality of the output.

If it's unclear, I say this is unclear.

If it's too verbose, I say it's too verbose.

Who gives a crap whether they wrote that by hand or it's AI word vomit. It's bad because it's bad!

Friction Was Doing You a Favor

Writing used to be slow.

Slow meant every sentence cost you something. So you asked: is this worth the cost? Most sentences weren't. You cut them or even better never wrote them.

That question, asked a thousand times per page, is what judgment actually is. .

Now, a prompt costs nothing. Hit enter and ten paragraphs show up in four seconds.

Nothing you didn't pay for gets cut. SO NONE OF IT DOES.

The slowness wasn't the obstacle to good writing. The slowness was the editing process, happening inside your head before the page ever saw it.

Skip the slowness and the editing still has to happen.

It just has to happen after, on purpose, by someone willing to delete what a machine was happy to keep.

Most people never go back and do it.

So here's my new message for our team.

If a significant percentage of your time involves moving things in and out of the AI chat interface and injecting little to no judgment on what it produces….you only have a job until I build an agent to automatically do what you're doing.

What the hell do I need you for?

And (even worse) if you are editing the output and I can't tell that you are, what does that say about the value of your payroll? The output needs to be CLEARLY better than what I would have gotten by just putting it in directly myself.

Get better, or get a new job.

Yallah Habibi,

Jon