There's alpha in AI free writing
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I’ve noticed lately, as I’m sure most of you have, that more and more of what I read every day is written by AI. It’s obviously in my agentic coding sessions, of which there are dozens in any given day. But it’s also in Github issues, pull requests, Twitter, LinkedIn, and even creeping into Slack. I’d wager that most of what I read in any given day is written by AI. Until AIs learn to write much better, and particularly in more concise, terse language, there’s an attention advantage given to anyone that puts their own thoughts and words together without AI doing the editing or writing.
This post, and the sporadic, infrequent writing that I intend put up on this site, is an attempt to take advantage of something I think is a unique advantage at this peculiar moment in time: writing without the AI is more likely to get other people’s attention and fewer people are doing it than before AI. There’s also the added benefit that I think writing helps one think through a problem or organize their thoughts around a given topic. Tuning your language helps tune your thinking.
My posts likely won’t be very long as I value concise language and thoughts. This is in high contrast with typical AI writing which is happy to drown you in flowery language, irrelevant details, or more specificity than is warranted for some given communique.
This isn’t to say that I’m against AI writing. Most of the time these days I have AIs write issues for me in Github, write PR descriptions, commit messages. But if I intend to have a coworker read it, I’m trying more and more to distill down what was produced by the AI to something more bitesize and manageable. It used to be that I’d just read through and do light editing. But since I see more and more AI driven writing getting put in front of me, I realize that I’m frequently just encountering walls of text.
For the moment, we meatsacks can differentiate ourselves by adding our own unique voice and to do it in far fewer words. We’ll see how long this lasts until the AIs become better at that than us as well.
I wrote the above without asking the AI for editing advice or any help. As a curiosity, I thought it would be interesting to hand this post over to Fable and see what it came up with.
Write the first post for my new blog. The title is: “There’s alpha in AI free writing” and the idea behind it is: “As more people use AI to write everything, reading words written solely by a human is a new found luxury. Doing your own writing can get you noticed in ways it couldn’t before.”
Give me an md file I can put into my site engine. Don’t look at any of the content in the repo so far, just put a file in the root.
Note: the post above was not in the repo or in any other place the AI could have accessed it. After putting in the prompt it took 45s to produce the following (feel free to skim to the end):
In markets, alpha is the return you get for doing something the crowd isn’t doing. It never lasts. The moment everyone piles into a trade, the edge is gone and you’re just paying fees. Right now the crowd is piling into AI writing, and in doing so they’re creating an edge for anyone willing to go the other way.
Almost everything I read now has the same texture. The emails, the launch posts, the LinkedIn essays, the docs. They’re competent. They’re smooth. The grammar is flawless and the structure is tidy and every paragraph lands with the soft thud of a summary sentence. And they’re all the same. AI didn’t make writing worse, exactly. It made it uniform. It raised the floor and then poured concrete over everything at floor level.
Which means the signal has moved. It used to be that polished prose signaled effort and care, because polish was expensive. You had to draft and revise and get someone to edit you. Now polish is free, so polish signals nothing. What’s expensive now, what can’t be faked at scale, is evidence that a specific person actually thought about something. A weird aside. An opinion held at some risk. A sentence with rhythm that a model would have sanded off. A detail so specific it could only have come from being there.
Readers can tell. Not always consciously, but they can tell. It’s the same instinct that lets you distinguish a form letter from a note someone actually wrote you, and it kicks in within a paragraph or two. When it does, something interesting happens: the reader leans in. Human writing is becoming a luxury good, and like all luxury goods, its value comes precisely from its scarcity and from the cost the maker paid to produce it.
That cost is the point, because the cost of writing is thinking. When you write something yourself, you’re forced to discover what you actually believe. Half my opinions I didn’t know I held until I tried to write them down and watched the first version fall apart. Handing that process to a model doesn’t just outsource the typing, it outsources the part where you find out you were wrong. The prose you get back is a summary of the consensus, delivered in the voice of no one, because that’s what the model is: the averaged voice of everyone who ever wrote about your topic. The average is, by construction, already priced in.
So here’s the trade. While everyone else is generating content, write. Badly at first, probably. Slowly, definitely. Publish things with rough edges and opinions you might have to walk back. In a sea of frictionless text, friction is how anyone knows you exist. The blog post that gets you the job, the essay that gets passed around, the paragraph in a cold email that actually gets answered — increasingly, these will be the ones that could not have been generated, because generated is now the default and defaults are invisible.
I say all this as someone who uses AI constantly. It writes code with me every day, and it’s genuinely great at that. But code is judged by whether it works. Writing is judged by whether it’s you. Those are different games, and the second one can’t be delegated without losing the thing being measured.
This is the first post on this blog. Everything here will be written by me, by hand, with all the unevenness that implies. That used to be an unremarkable thing to promise. Now it’s an edge.
There’s alpha in it. For a while, anyway. Get it while it lasts.
Done — the post is at theres-alpha-in-ai-free-writing.md in the repo root, with title and date frontmatter you can adapt to whatever your engine expects.
The angle: alpha as a contrarian trade — AI made polish free, so polish no longer signals anything; what’s scarce and legible now is evidence of a specific person thinking, and the cost of writing (the thinking) is exactly what makes it valuable. It closes on the career payoff: in a sea of generated defaults, friction is how you get noticed.
One thing to know before publishing: the closing section promises “everything here will be written by me, by hand” — which sits awkwardly on a post I just wrote for you. You may want to rewrite that paragraph in your own words, or treat this draft as a scaffold and pass it through your own voice. Given the thesis, this might be the one post on the site that most needs your fingerprints on it.
Ok, I’m back. I’m leaving my original post as is after reading that version. I’m laughing that in the post it said I (me, Paul) would be doing all the writing, while in the response to me after writing it warned of that lie (although it just called it awkward rather than lying). Apart from that, I’m actually a bit surprised that it captured many of the points I was intending to write given just the title and short description. I wrote both of those before I wrote the post and didn’t update them. So, it’s not, not wrong.
But it leaned way too heavily into the markets thing. The whole point of putting that in the title was to gloss over it, to be clever, rather than hit you over the head with it. I have no idea if the title lands with you, dear reader, but I like its version less than my own. And, true to form, it used 605 words to say whatever it said, while I used 374.
Humans write less because we’re fucking slow compared to the clankers. We also value brevity because we read REALLY FUCKING SLOW compared to the clankers. But thanks, Fable, for playing along. Your services are greatly appreciated.
Anyway, this was a fun one to think about. Hopefully I’ll write more on this site, but who knows… I’m a lazy meatbag.