Now my headlines are not only nerd-bait but they are obscure nerd-bait.
Another day, another piece arguing that using imitative AI to write for you is not a cheat, that the output is still yours in every meaningful sense because, and I quote, the writer is the “…thought-leader behind the piece”. That is nonsense, but it is a particularly pernicious kind of nonsense that is not unique to imitative AI. It is a kind of intellectual poison that infests so much of our business and educational establishment.
The counter to the writing argument is simple: if the words are not selected by you, then any expertise and thought you put into the subject is, at best, diminished. The process of writing, of forming the argument, is the process of exposing your expertise and thought. Accepting the remixed words of other writers in place of that process means that your expertise and thought are diluted. Such output is not driving towards your ideas and expertise. It is instead driving towards the statistically most likely assemblage of tokens that its training data suggests should be present in a piece on your subject. That is not the same thing as your thought and your expertise. That so many people cannot see such a simple fact is itself a symptom of the plague of thought-leadership.
Steve Jobs undeniably saved Apple in the 1990s. Most people think that happened because of his ability to come up with great ideas. But his ideas were not especially radical — and they were often incomplete or wrong. His refusal to have an app store at the launch of the iPhone, or his failure to recognize the appeal of digital reading, for example. They were failures of imagination commented on at the time, but did nothing to slow the adoption or lessen the praise for the iPhone and iPad. And what ideas he did have were often pedestrian or based on other people’s work. He was hardly the first person to try a pocket computer like the iPhone, after all. What made Jobs successful was his taste and discernment, and his ability to work with others to apply that taste and discernment to basic ideas. Jobs was involved in every major project at Apple and Pixar in his time heading each. He did not thought-lead; he got his hands into the details, worked closely with others, and made sure their collective decisions were executed. Because execution is all.
Ideas are easy. I have a dozen ideas a day. None of them are worth anything until they are beaten into shape. Given that I am a failed writer, none of them have been executed, by me, well. But that does not mean that the ideas were poor (zombies taste of chicken is going to be a hit for someone!). It means the execution was. You don’t change the world or even create a decent widget by thought leadership. Thought leadership is very often just an excuse to denigrate expertise and people who know how to get things done in favor of marketing speech and PR bullshit. Pontificating and tossing ideas into the world does nothing without execution. Jobs remade the entire consumer electronics category not by having wonderful ideas but by executing on ideas better than anyone else at the time. He didn’t thought-lead. He executed. We would be better off if we cared about making things work more than daydreaming and pretending ideas were all.
Weekly Word Count
Pretty much nothing. I went back to the drawing board on the Pratchett meets Rockford Files piece and am waiting to hear back on the plot changes for the abortion/tech story. It’s been a week that convinces any sane man that he is a terrible writer throwing words fruitlessly at the void. Fortunately, I am not entirely sane. No White Sox fan is.
Hope you all have a great weekend.