I don't see any evidence whatsoever that AI seems to be killing.
I mean, there's like a lot of bad AI writing, like, plastered over the internet, and there's like a lot of bad student assignments that have probably been written by AI.
But I don't think anyone's serious.
I think it would have to be, like, full superintelligence before I was like, okay, this is going to replace human writing.
Full stop. And we have much bigger issues to worry about at that point.
that, even if that happened.
Let's say we have a system that can write better than a human.
Do you think that the most popular novel of 2027 has a human name on it or not?
Like a human writer on it or not.
Brandon I think yes.
Brian I think it does too.
When I finish a great book, the first thing I go do is like, I want to know about the writer on another life story.
And I don't think I'll ever have that feeling to like AI writing.
There is something about you read an incredible book and you kind of, you could connect to a person even though you don't literally know them.
You feel like you do it you feel like you have this important shared human experience and that is like some significant percentage of the enjoyment of a great book to me and I bet we keep doing that.
How do you think that we should be training writers differently in the chat GPT world?
I heard this story once.
I don't know if it's true or not, but it was like some creative writing teacher.
They would have these students come and, you know, the first day or whatever, she'd give an assignment, which is write the first paragraph of your novel, and people would come in with all of the standard, like, freshman and college mistakes.
Like, you know, way too many like stretched metaphors, way too much like flowery language and then she'd go through this like exercise of I think a standard one first which is cut one metaphor from every page, cut one unnecessary word from every sentence, cut this, cut that, cut that, and you take this like ten page thing down and you cut it down to one page and it would like it would not be so tortuously overwritten and then the class would read them and they would say like okay what happened here, what's that?
And the answer was there was like no story at all there was the instinct was try to like write and it's like beautifully whatever kind of satisfying to write thing but it's no fun to read like their readers want a story yeah and the thing from this like teacher is that we might teach people to write beautifully but there's there's no interesting story on the other hand you have these like sort of massively mass -market successful.
I don't even know what.
Like, I'll pick on, like, the Twilight books or something.
Quite interesting story.
Horrible writing. And the question is like, can we make it easier to get both?
And can we teach people how to use these tools?
Do you have a sense for how good chat GPT storytelling is?
Like, if I turn on voice mode and read it to a kid, how much better is that versus, mom?
I think the storytelling is not yet very good, but I would expect it to get better.
We're still at a place where the models are just generally improving so much. I mean, there's areas that we could push on that'd be better for storytelling, but if the model just gets a lot smarter and also if we train it to be better at storytelling, that'll help.
How do you do that?
Do you show it a bunch of examples of what makes a good story and what makes a bad story, which I don't think is like magic?
I think we really understand that well now we just haven't tried to do that.
Yeah. How do you use chat GPT every day?
I used to only use it for a few things and both Ch requiring better and I figured out to use it more and so the cool thing now is I really do use it as a general purpose tool and I hope that a few years from now when you ask that I'll say I use it for most things that I do like every few months I find new ways to use it new ways to incorporate it's it's obviously still Terribly integrated into most people's workflows, but that's just going to get better and better When you're talking to friends, you know like you should use chat GPT for this What are the themes that you're telling them to do?
Uh I mean the thing that I hear about from my friends that they love it for the most is Like computer programming help in some way or other and the number of people who say that's like transformed my life Yeah, I mean, like, it's very gratifying to hear.
It's a lot of fun. Like, there are other things where, you know, people say, it's like, change the way my kids learn, or teachers say change the way I teach is, that's great too.
And, but I, uh, and then there's like, incredible examples with healthcare, the way people use this for creative work, but the programming one is like near and dear to my heart.
Many of my friends are programmers, so I hear about that a lot.
Email. Yeah. You do a lot of writing by email and you've… I do a lot of very short email.
I do a lot of seven -word emails.
And how has ChatGBT helped you with that?
It's super good at summarizing long emails, like most long emails, honestly, I just stop.
I don't even read, but if I have to read one, it's super good at… Like, chat GBT's ability to effectively summarize long pieces of content, like a really long thread or whatever, very impressive.
How has knowledge of LLMs changed how you think about writing and communication?
I mean, I think we are going to all – not all of us – I think many of us are going to write in a different way in the future.
I don't mean like people are just going to use LLMs to write stuff for them.
because one of the strangest things that I think happens is when people put a few bullet points into an LLM, have it generated a nice email, send it to somebody else, and then they summarize it on the other end because we can't – we just can't agree that, you know, we just want the bullet points back and forth, and there's still this societal nicety.
But someone is going to build – probably somebody already has built a first version this, like, a great tool to write in a new way where you have this thing that is not, you know, expanding your bullet points but is helping you discover new things in the idea space.
And that's awesome.
Like, that's what computers do at their best, right?
They help, they are a tool that help you do things you otherwise couldn't do.
I've always thought it was strange how we've had this tools -for -thought idea for decades and yet the vast majority of the way people write is they open up Microsoft word and they have no aid from a computer really.
It's just like a typewriter.
Yeah. I mean… It turns out that, like, writing's pretty good.
I don't… We can for sure make it better, but I understand why.
That's where we are.
Hey, if you're interested in writing with AI, I recorded an ultimate guide to how I'm thinking about it.
It's a 90 -minute video with everything I've learned.
And by the of it, you're gonna be a better writer, but also you're gonna have a way clearer sense of where the world is going.
And you can watch it right here.
