general

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.

Game of Likes

I was remembering that time when the MrBeast training manual was leaked and people thought it might offer some insights into how to win at YouTube. Well, it certainly gave some insights into MrBeast.

How to succeed in MrBeast Production | simonwillison.net

There was a part of the manual that made a clear argument in favour of ‘virality’:

This is what dictates what we do for videos. “I Spent 50 Hours In My Front Yard” is lame and you wouldn’t click it. But you would hypothetically click “I Spent 50 Hours In Ketchup”. Both are relatively similar in time/effort but the ketchup one is easily 100x more viral. An image of someone sitting in ketchup in a bathtub is exponentially more interesting than someone sitting in their front yard.

This is a great example of how people do things because they think they have agency but actually their environment largely conditions what they do. If you make videos for YouTube, sooner or later you’ll at least contemplate sitting in a bath of ketchup. That’s the logic of the medium controlling both what’s ‘interesting’ (50 hours in ketchup) and what’s ‘rational’ (filming it).

This little theory goes some way towards accounting for what happened to the likes of Russell Brand, the comedian turned influencer turned defendant, who seems to have pursued every attention-grabbing fashion under the sun, like a seagull checking out empty takeaway trays. It might also at least partly explain the creepy and often abusive behaviour of those ‘manosphere’ influencers in Louis Theroux’s documentary on the tendency. One of them said “I’m playing the game of life and I’m playing it very well”.

That – or the game of likes is playing him and it’s playing him very well.

Because it’s not just the medium (YouTube) that determines the message (50 hours in ketchup): there’s also the audience. ‘An image of someone sitting in ketchup in a bathtub is ingfinitely more interesting…’ …well, interesting to whom exactly? The implication of the MrBeast manual was that this question was so irrelevant as to remain beneath asking. Presumably the algorithm delivered views and the view count went up, up, up. But whose views?

When you sit in a bath of ketchup for 50 hours you’ll attract the people who enjoy this kind of thing - the spectacle, the humiliation, the low-key shock value, (though presumably not especially the ketchup).

But is this the kind of attention or the kind of people you really want to attract? They just want ketchup, not you or anything else about you.

Unless and until you sit in a bath of custard.

Mar 11, 2026 ∞

Podcast listening overtakes radio? The New Publishing Standard.

Congratulations are due to Dave Winer for an amazing achievement. Micro.blog has a great discovery tool for interesting podcasts. RSS FTW!

The name might be archaic, but at least they didn’t call it downloadable radio.

#podcasts #radio

Jan 6, 2026 ∞

The posts of 2025

I’m much better at writing new stuff than consolidating the old, but it’s time to review what’s been posted here during 2025. Short posts excluded, it’s quite a lot, considering I’m Writing Slowly.

There’s also a list of the posts of 2024 and the posts of 2023 too.

And don’t forget to check out my book, Shu Ha Ri: The Japanese Way of Learning, for Artists and Fighters.
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