Atomic Notes

Apr 22, 2026 ∞

💬 “For good or ill, a new generation, though raised in the lap of AI, will not be speaking or writing anything like the ‘intelligence’ that raised it.” - Notes on the artificial style of writing.

#Zettelkasten #LLM #AIPhilosophy #Writing #Notemaking #AIWriting

Apr 21, 2026 ∞

Notes on the artificial style of writing

In which the artificial style of writing encounters the iron hand of fashion

AI makes writing more bland, as reported by NBC News. This will accelerate the rate at which readers demand new forms of writing that AI can’t yet (or ever) achieve. There’s been plenty of talk about how AI caters to the economic requirement for efficiency (aka reduced labour costs), but there’s another very obvious economic requirement too: novelty.

AI handles novelty of combination very well. Just try asking it for a story about a unicycling giraffe who learns quantum mechanics and escapes from a zoo in the Alpha Centuri star system — it won’t refuse you. That kind of combinatorial novelty it handles with aplomb. At no point will it tell you this is a bad idea. On the contrary, “You might consider how the unicycle itself acts as a metaphor for the observer effect,” says Google’s Gemini as it eggs me on. But it doesn’t produce novelty of expression. Despite the arguable novelty of this scenario, the adventures of a fugitive circus scientist space giraffe, the story, as written by AI, will still be, well, bland.

Cheaper, better and newer. Consumers crave novelty, which drives the endless parade of fashion, and the instant obsolescence of what only yesterday was highly desirable. In a sense, AI writing stands at the end of an era, the era that saw the kind of writing on which AI has been trained as up to date. For example, if a chat-bot wrote an article or a piece of advertising copy in the 150-year-old style of Charles Dickens, it would be quaint, but hardly useable. To achieve the effect it does, of being ‘as good as an average human writer’, it must mimic what’s considered the current writing style, and it does so blandly.

Now the research shows that AI-generated prose isn’t just bland, it’s also distorted in several other ways, many of them, such as pronoun use, connected with style.

How LLMs distort our written language.

But fashions change, and the blandness of the AI style will accelerate the speed at which writing style fashions change. Just as we can’t take seriously today someone who writes like Charles Dickens (unless it’s deliberate pastiche), tomorrow we won’t be able to take seriously any writing produced in the style of a bot. And that means soon we won’t be able to take seriously any writing that’s written in our current style.

Top level categories in my notes

What kind of top-level categories do you have for your notes?

If you’re doing knowledge management you might use or adapt Tiago Forte’s PARA system:

Projects
Activities
Resources
Archive

Or you might consider using Bob Doto’s four-folder approach:

In-box
Sleeping
References
Main

Tame the chaos with just four folders for all your notes.

Prolific German sociologist Niklas Luhmann’s second collection of notes, his second Zettelkasten (ZKII) was arranged according to eleven top-level categories, based on subjects or themes associated with his singular major project, a theory of society.

Organisation theory
Functionalism
Decision theory
Amt: office, post, job, duty
Formal / informal order
Sovereignty / State
Isolated/individual terms, problems
Economy
Ad hoc notes
Archaic societies
High cultures

In his lecture on Luhmann’s Zettelkasten, researcher Johannes Schmidt of the Niklas Luhmann Archive at Bielefeld University observes that these headings are hardly comprehensive. Instead they strongly echo the progression of Luhmann’s scholarly interests over many years.

“Looking at these you quickly see that this does not describe a certain body of knowledge to work through like in the first Zettelkasten. If you know a bit about the development of Luhmann’s theory you quickly recognize this as a historic record of research interests.”

Thoughts on ‘The Memex Method’

Today I noticed that the ridiculously prolific author and tech activist Cory Doctorow is commissioned to publish a book in 2027 on “The Memex Method”, which he described in a post of that name back in 2021. The basic idea is that he publishes continually in public by means of many, many blog posts, then collates it into books.

💬 “Traditionally, a writer identifies a subject of interest and researches it, then writes about it. In the (my) blogging method, the writer blogs about everything that seems interesting, until a subject gels out of all of those disparate, short pieces.”

I mentioned this post back in 2023, when I suggested: to build something big, start with small fragments.

Writing is still about thinking

According to author Larry McEnerney, writing is an essential part of a sophisticated thinking process. He says:

💬 “So here’s what you’re doing, you are thinking about your world in very difficult ways. This is a terrifically good thing, and it’s the source of most of the value of your work. Now, you are also writing about that world, and this is where it starts, the problem starts arising. Unlike a journalist, almost surely you are using your writing process to help yourself think. In other words, the thinking that you’re doing is at such a level of complexity that you have to use writing to help yourself do your thinking.” - Larry McEnerney: The Craft of Writing Effectively | Youtube

In my own reading I’ve felt there’s a difference between published writing as useful information (e.g. ‘how to fix that annoying computer problem’) and published writing as the voice of a human grappling with complexity (‘how I fixed my annoying computer problem ‘).

In the first instance I don’t care if the ‘author’ is AI, so long as the suggested fix actually works. I don’t need evidence of a thought process; I just want to fix my computer. In the second instance, the central thing I’m looking for is evidence of human thought. And if the writing starts to smell of AI, I don’t bother even finishing it.

But even though the AI-written information articles always seem highly plausible, I’ve found the ‘information’ contained to be highly untrustworthy. Sometimes it’s correct and helpful, other times it’s wildly off beam. That’s not exactly ideal. I noticed that at least one version of Microsoft Copilot says it’s ‘for entertainment only’ - which makes it a bit worrying that they named it Copilot.

So whether I do need a human or don’t need a human, either way, AI prose isn’t really doing it for me.

Well, here are some articles that consider the vexed question of whether AI text counts as writing, or just glorified Lorem Ipsum filler – or worse:

Alex Woods | Don’t let AI write for you.
N. Cailie | I am definitely missing the pre-AI writing era.
Elizabeth Spiers | The Anti-Intellectualism of Silicon Valley Elites.
“We can decide that we want to be human” | The Guardian.
Less Wrong | Folie à Machine: LLMs and Epistemic Capture.
Manuel Morale’s two-step process for writing AI-free blog posts (an amusing response to an interesting discussion).

I’m the author of Shu Ha Ri: The Japanese Way of Learning, for artists and Fighters, which I wrote myself and I also took all the photos myself. If you’re interested in learning, teaching, art, fighting, or Japanese aesthetics and philosophy, you might just find this short book of relevance to you.

Mar 30, 2026 ∞

AI is changing how we think. Many people now swap deep reading for building with agents. Is the Zettelkasten just a nostalgic relic of a Twentieth Century academic process? This article explores why “efficient” tech might actually fail our cognition.

💬 It’s intriguing that despite incredible, relentless waves of innovation stretching right back at least to Gutenberg, the age-old question of how best to write and publish for an audience is still not completely settled.

Will the last Zettelkasten practitioner please turn off the lights?

#Zettelkasten #AI #PKM #Philosophy