I keep noticing a thing about myself: there are certain phrasings that make me tired and bored the second I hit them. It usually has nothing to do with what the text is actually saying. It is the sameness, the uniformity that has been spreading around me ever since AI got good at producing sentences.
Because the easier text became to generate, the more of it gets pushed at us, and with that volume something becomes obvious pretty quickly: individual differences in style and word choice matter. They are what lets you experience a piece of writing as its own separate document, instead of sitting there with that vague cloudy feeling that you somehow already know this stuff.
I hope there are psychologists out there working on this. How does the uniformity affect what we are still able to take in? Someone must be measuring it.
The other thing I notice happens in conversation. Actual talking, with actual humans. The pet phrases of specific AI models have started showing up in the way people around me speak. Eieieiei.
And then, to close the loop back to this blog: if this text feels a little different from the other things you read today (I hope it does), part of the reason might be that I wrote the original myself, start to finish, and the AI only polished it. I have written before about how AI edits my texts, or doesn't, and about putting a label on the stuff I write with it, so none of that is new here.
What is new-ish is that I started to be more intentional about writing my essays in German. Lately that is more and more the language my personal texts begin in.
Which means my notes and my thinking happen in a different language than the one I prompt my AI in. That is - I hope, anyway - a kind of firewall in my head. Maybe a small contribution to this thing you are currently spending your time on being ever so slightly different from what Gemini & Co would have coughed up from a simple prompt.
ttfn!
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