Tag: Writing

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An Ode to Electronic Communication (Now That Words Are Free)

An early-morning kitchen table in a city apartment above Tokyo, where a tablet shows a watercolor illustration of three small shapes, one enormous block, and the same three shapes again.

Writing got free, reading did not, which makes every message you send a withdrawal from somebody else’s day.

TL;DR: AI made writing free and left reading as expensive as it always was, so every inflated message moves work from the person sending it to the person receiving it. The meter is bolted to the side that got cheaper, and nothing counts what lands on the other. The padding a model adds is billed twice, once in tokens and once in attention. Five daily AI users voting together now spot machine prose 299 times out of 300. Change what you ask the tool for: cut the draft in half every time. Send nothing that came back on the first prompt.

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You signed it. You own it. That is the only test that matters.

A tightly framed close-up of a printed page on a light oak desk. Three short clean paragraphs of dark grey serif text are visible. In the margin, a handwritten check mark and the short note "Fully agree!" in dark blue ink. At the bottom of the page, a hand holding a black fountain pen is mid-signature.

The argument over what counts as cheating is the wrong argument. Here is the one worth having, and the three questions that settle it.

A friend asked me last week whether it was cheating to have ChatGPT clean up his English before he sent a client memo. He is fluent, not native; the model fixes a stray preposition, tightens a sentence, lifts the register half a notch. He has been doing this for two years. He has never asked the question out loud before.

I asked him whether he uses Grammarly. He laughed. Of course, he uses Grammarly. Everyone uses Grammarly. Grammarly is not cheating; Grammarly is hygiene.

That is the entire debate, in two minutes.

Continue reading “You signed it. You own it. That is the only test that matters.”