I’ve known Mike Long for two decades and worked with him for most of that time. He’s taught speechwriting courses for the Professional Speechwriters Association while hammering away at his own prolific writing that has included two big-selling books in the last few years, The Molecule of More, which he co-wrote, and Taming the Molecule of More, which he wrote solo. We’ve broken bread and drank together and laughed a lot. We’ve agreed wholeheartedly on a lot of things and agreed to disagree on a lot of others.
This is Mike.
But only occasionally have we gone at it like we went at it one morning last week, when Mike emailed me in response to a blog post where I’d quoted a policy I liked on AI writing, from the bloggers at the Admissions office at a prestigious research university we’ll call Tech.EDU:
“Unless explicitly stated otherwise, all blogs on the Tech.EDU Admissions website are written without the use of generative AI/language models. We view the blogs as a relationship between our bloggers and you, our human readers. The bloggers show our respect for that relationship by writing in their own voice and sharing their own perspective, without being filtered or rearticulated by generative AI, so that you can get to know some Tech.EDU students for real, and share a little bit in their subjective and lived experience.”
What was the matter with that?
“If this paragraph were cow manure, one could fertilize all of America’s crops for the next century,” Mike wrote, zeroing in on “[A]ll blogs on the Tech.EDU Admissions website are written without the use of generative AI/language models. … The bloggers show our respect for that relationship by writing in their own voice….”
Wrote Mike:
Replace “without the use of generative AI” with the words below and the jagoff faux-respect pose comes clear: “All blogs are written without the use of … research. Asking around. Making a few calls. Checking with Cindy in accounting. Reading a book. Asking an expert. Asking a rando. Thinking before you write.
You get it. “Writing their own voice and sharing their own perspective” is a Tech.EDU-way of saying “without trying to add clarity and information beyond the four walls of their own head.” But wait! All those other things—research, etc—are peachy. Even asking for an editor to take a look is cool. But not asking … a machine that sorts and collects information much like a person does.
What’s the point of professional communication? To communicate clearly. There are lots of tools that help us do that. But Luddites Unlimited are scared of this one new tool.
As David Byrne put it, “Same as it ever was.”
Busy but game on a Thursday morning, I flashed back and started a conversation not at first meant for any other eyes but Mike’s—and thus referencing a lot of comments he’s made over the last few years as an ebullient-bordering-on-truculent AI enthusiast. Truc-bullient, let’s call him. I wrote:
Yeah, I don’t know how to contend with this, Mike. We differ in our thinking on this and I don’t know how to reconcile it.
The very idea of even asking AI to help me out with the name of a character in a novel I’m writing drains the life and reason out of writing for me.
When I was a journalist working on a story, “asking around” and “making a few calls” and “asking a rando” and even “reading a book” always gave me more energy and excited me more than researching on the Internet, which often drained me of curiosity and interest, even when the results were fruitful.
And I daresay the stories I wrote that leaned heavily on the first kinds of sources were probably far more compelling than the stories that leaned heavily on the latter.
So leaning on AI—which adds a whole layer of synthetic aggregation—I know you love it and find it stimulating.
But then, you like asking AI what you should be interested in on a drive from D.C. to Huntsville. I want to find that shit by accident and [consulting with AI] bleaches the interest from the trip.
We’re both humanists, I know. But with different instincts. And I guarantee you mine are as spiritually felt as yours.
And finally, this is the first letter to the editor you’ve sent me in a while. And I’m happy to have it. But why do you care so much about the Tech.EDU Admissions people (and my endorsement of their standards)? It sounds like you think they’re going to be bulldozed like calculator-resistors from the 1950s. Why not just wait until they’re (we’re) plowed under by you AI enthusiasts and your inevitable correctness?
(Hey, maybe I could publish a version of this exchange.)
With Mike’s permission, that’s just what I’ll do—tomorrow and Thursday, on Writing Boots.
I’ve taken Mike’s class twice and I know he’s passionate about writing while also deeply practical about the professional demands he faces. I am a little surprised he views LLMs as a tool like any other, but not entirely so. Mike knows that in the highly demanding world of executive corporate communications, a writer cannot go without all the tools available.
Where I see a diference is in how the AI tool functions. It is passive. It purports to do the thinking for you. This is fundamentally unlike asking a colleague for editorial advice, unless you’re very good at maintaining skepticism.
Also, most AI writing is bad. So is most human writing, but we professionals are nto most humans.
Stay tuned, Mike—et al. Tomorrow and Thursday, Mr. Long will make more radical arguments (and so will I).