The Writing Tax

Should I read the AI-generated text you wrote?

Writing has historically been costly to the author. When you write something, you pay a tax, you pay it in the form of a mental cost, in the effort of figuring out what exactly you meant to convey, and in the sentences you refactored or deleted. More than anything you pay it by actually thinking about what you wanted to write.

None of us used to consider this a bug, it was just always part of the process of expressing our thoughts precisely.

I don’t want the pain of writing a document to exist because suffering is virtuous (though it can be). I want the pain to exist for you because I want you to care about what you write. Your effort should show that you genuinely are investing in the words you wrote down. And you already subconsciously do this. When was the last time you didn’t just skim over announcement emails, yet you paid attention to the 1-line Slack message from your teammates? Different taxes paid, hence different attention acquired.

Readers pay a tax too. Attention is not free for any of us, which is why I think there should be a balance. If you invest something in creating text, I can spend something to read it.

Except that using LLMs to produce heaps of text has broken this contract. The balance has shifted against the reader, every time you ask an LLM to write a document or a report, you’re asking the reader to spend more effort reading the text than you spent writing it. This is the reason it feels disrespectful to the reader.

Some people write badly but still care a lot, but maybe they’re writing in their second language, maybe they didn’t have enough time to refine their writing, maybe they just write bad prose. I think that is okay. The tax isn’t paid by the attractiveness of the prose you write, it’s paid by the depth of your thinking. The awkwardness of someone struggling to express a difficult idea in their words is vastly preferable to fluent prose that is devoid of any thought.

This isn’t an anti-AI manifesto, but you should use the tool without dodging the tax. This just means that the writing tax cannot be avoided. If you can’t spend it before you use AI, spend it after you use it. Read every single line the LLM generated, iterate on it, and then edit it, hack away at the ideas and text until it’s yours, and not Claude’s.

The text that is unambiguously in your voice is the text I would love to read. If you did not incur any costs to create something, how much did it matter to you?

^{Image: Carl Spitzweg, The Poor Poet (1839). Neue Pinakothek, Munich. Public domain.}