Who Wrote This

My previous post about retirement was written by AI. I told Gemini that I needed to write a post, and then gave it a bullet list of things that I wanted to talk about. I also included instructions about what the tone of the post should be. Gemini did a decent job but it did not feel like I would have written that post, so I took the text and made a few changes. I removed the section headings, removed a few extraneous sentences, merged a few sentences to make them shorter and easier to read, etc. In the end, the post looked like it was my style but anybody who read that would know it is too flawless to have been written by hand — it had to be written by a machine. Also, when I will read it in the future, it will not feel like it came from me, so the whole point of writing something with AI’s assistance feels pointless.

Don’t get me wrong — I think it is a great tool for writing at your workplace. It simply makes things so much easier to churn out a wall of text that has to be produced anyways. But even in that context, I think a message from a leader to their team will be much more effective if it feels like it came right out of the horse’s mouth.

And one final thought about en and em dashes. When I write with the aid of AI, I remove all em dashes from text because that is one of the giveaways of something written by AI. But I love using them in my writing, even when I am writing a journal entry in a dead tree notebook. So, the em dashes you see in this post are here because I added them, not because this post was written by Gemini.