For thousands of years, the production of written artifacts has been an exclusively human enterprise. That’s changed. On social media, I’m bombarded with AI writing. It’s hard to describe the smell of shit, but it’s easy to recognize when you’ve smelt it. Same goes with AI writing — you just know. It’s too neat, riddled with clichés, and generally stale.
I’m not sure what form this blog will take. Only time will tell. Still, it’ll be condemned to a state of continuous flux. It aspires for a literary bent — be about poems, about prose, and more — so isn’t it strange that my first post starts by citing economists? Once while I was scrolling on X, I saw a post from the economist Branko Milanović commiting to what he called the Blysma pledge. He pulled it from a Substack post by Angus Blysma, hence its name. And yes, Blysma’s also an economist. Anyways, I read it, liked it, and thought it’d be good to start this blog by likewise committing my allegiance to this so-called Blysma pledge, which is the following:
Given the flood of AI-assisted writing (and even more insidiously, AI-assisted thinking, transcribed by human hands) now thrust upon us, I am compelled to declare that nothing published on this blog has or will involve the use of AI tools at any stage: not to summarise, review, edit, brainstorm, or write. For this I apologise: I am sure my pieces would be better-researched, and my sentences less clunky, if I used them. […] In truth, my rationale is purely selfish: this blog has always been my tool for reading, thinking and writing better. Any use of AI would undermine this. What’s in it for you? My hope is, at least, that my pieces are very different (if surely more imperfect) to what you would receive if you asked your frontier-LLM-of-choice about the books that I review.
Like any craft, writing requires practice. If I excuse myself from practice by handing off the mental load of writing to AI, my writing muscles will steadily and surely start to atrophy. This blog is part of my effort to prevent this fearful fate. The spread of AI writing threatens writing’s humanity, but when something we cherish comes under threat, it can also allow us to gain a greater consciousness of our appreciation for it. The writing here is artisanal. Handmade. Organic. Funny, aren’t I? Anyways, the blog is zealously committed to the idea of writing as fundamentally a human act. Writing shelters souls and makes it possible for these souls to be witnessed by other souls. Isn’t that what gives writing its beauty? Writing simply can’t be put on the assembly line, can’t be automated, can’t be optimized by machines. So, my hope is you can come to the blog with a tranquil mind knowing the writing will be peculiar, flawed, and imperfect, but entirely reflective of a human voice. It’ll hopefully be one refuge, for both writer and reader, from the flood of AI slop that plagues all our screens.
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