Next week I'm headed to the University of Cologne in Germany to talk about what AI is doing to our writing. That means two things: no newsletter next week, and I managed to find yet another use for my Ph.D. in Greek and Latin. I'm filing this moment away for the next time someone asks me, "Do you even use your Ph.D.?"
So where is the intersection of ancient languages and AI-generated writing?
Well, the first time I felt an emotional connection while reading a Latin text happened in my sophomore year in college. The text was Vergil's Aeneid.
The lead character, Aeneas, is a refugee of the Trojan War and finds himself in the foreign land of Carthage (if you know the Odyssey, which has gotten far more Hollywood attention, you can think of Aeneas as the Latin version of Odysseus). He comes across a mural depicting the war he just fled. In this scene, Vergil describes the mural in words that convey emptiness, uselessness, and death.
The text is very repetitive, and the repetition is effective. Imagine you are a refugee fleeing a fallen city, your home. You'd feel hollow and helpless, and would see the world around you through the same lens. Everywhere you look you would see emptiness, uselessness, and death.
Aeneas begins to cry as he studies the mural. I, too, was on the verge of tears.
Sometimes when I read AI-generated writing, words like empty, useless, vacuous cross my mind, and the same sense of woe I felt reading Vergil joins them. Except this is a woe I would prefer to be without.
I won't fall prey to using a blanket term like slop. AI-generated writing is not always empty, and it's not always slop. It can have a point to make. It can be the outcome of some genuinely interesting thoughts.
And yet you can't escape the writing itself with its formulaic and repetitive tics. It is extremely tiring to read. And the worst part is, the more AI-written content we consume, the more we will naturally start to adapt its style, even without the help of AI. I can feel it in myself sometimes, and I'm not sure yet how to inoculate myself.
Television, literature, social media, music have always had an influence on our language. When I was growing up, things we liked were sick, rad, or sweet. For today's youth, things are... well, I'm not sure. I'll have to ask my daughter what the cool kids are saying in about 10-15 years.
The AI-ification of our language is working in much the same way, but the sheer speed of it makes it difficult to combat.
But combat it we shall. At my conference next week I will argue that the same close reading that made me cry over Aeneas is what will save us from being infected by the machine.
→ Read more about it here: https://cleverest.me/en/learn-now/writing-with-ai-keep-your-voice
Try this week: build an AI editor
There's a lot of hubbub around AI's ability to write. But not nearly enough around its ability to read. That's what this week is about: stop trying to make AI write like you. Instead, put it to work as your editor.
First, ask your AI assistant to read and analyze your best writing. Give it a few things you are especially proud of and ask:
Read these and describe my writing voice as a short style guide — my usual sentence length, the words and phrases I lean on, how I open and close, and what I'd never write. Be specific.
Skim it, fix anything it got wrong. It's natural for this to be an iterative process. When you are happy, save the style guide in a place you like to work with AI: a project, or a custom GPT or Gem. Add the following instructions:
Edit my writing against that style guide with the lightest touch possible. Fix what's clunky or unclear, but keep my voice, my structure and my word choices — don't rewrite it as your own. And tell me what you changed, so I can overrule you.
If you are working with Claude, give it the style guide and the instructions above and ask it to create a skill for you. Then you can ask it to use the editor skill whenever you want it to proofread some writing.
What I'm reading
How to Keep Your Writing Weird in the Age of AI — Katie Parrott / Every. Parrott calls AI "the timid scribe": it takes whatever's specific and a little odd in your draft and smooths it toward the statistical middle.
What the Em Dash Says About AI-assisted Writing — And Us — Rhea Purohit / Every. This is an older piece but still rings true. An em-dash (or "Not X, but Y") reflects more on how something was made than the thought behind it or the point it makes.
The dawn of the post-literate society — James Marriott. Marriott argues that writing is what cools and rationalizes our thinking, and as reading and writing give way to scrolling and talking, we drift back toward something more oral, more emotional, more tribal. This started well before AI, but AI is bringing it into even sharper focus.
Slow note
I recently bought the most beautiful notebook from Paper Republic (not sponsored). Writing by hand is still hands down the best way to organize your thoughts, to process and retain what you learn.