With the release of many LLMs from OpenAI and Anthropic, people who normally don’t write have started to “write” more. And by more, I mean a lot more. Not that the quality is good, but the quantity (especially of words) is definitely very noticeably large. Trust me, I’d know. My boss and I use Claude at work and I’m pretty confident that one of the documentation he sent me is definitely a medical-grade sleeping pill in disguise because it was sending me directly to dream land within the first 30 seconds of me reading it. Either that or it was a military-grade psychological weapon that makes your head hurts so much you wish you were 6 feet under after reading the first few sentences. To put it plainly, it was an AI slop–one of the worst I’ve ever had the displeasure of reading. Some people really do think quantity matters more than quality.

On a related note, you’ve probably seen people (AI bros) talk about how they teach their models to mimic their writing voice(?) or use skills to make them not sound like AI slop. Posts like these don’t really make me mad, but they do make me wonder why these people only started writing after they have access to these tools that essentially writes for them. My bet is on them wanting to make money, and posting on platforms like Facebook or Twitter (currently known as X) can make them a lot of money as long as there is enough volume of posts and engagements.

Honestly, that’s not the sad part for me. The really sad part for me is that many people have decided that they should maximize the amount of money made and minimize the amount of effort put into it. If teaching an LLM to write like you is going to make them more money, then that is what they’ll do. You shouldn’t have fun while making money anymore if there is a way to further minimize your efforts.

I say this as if I’m immune to the hyper-optimized money-making mindset. But truth be told, I know I’m part of the problem, too. I use Claude at work to lessen the amount of actual work I have to do. It doesn’t make me happy, but it allows me to be lazy and still make money. It also makes me sad. Really sad.

No, I’m not being sarcastic. I still want to write code by hand. But having used Claude for the past 6 months really allowed me to be lazier and decay my mechanical programming skills to the point where I wonder that, if I went back to writing code by hand again, will I still be able to keep up with the current deadlines.

It’s not a world I want to live in, but it’s also a world I’ve walked myself into with my own two legs.

Obviously, this is not true for everyone. Inspiring people like Andrew Kelley still doesn’t use LLMs in his work on the Zig programming language and does not allow LLM-generated contributions to the language as well. People like him gives me hope that, no matter how powerful and common LLMs become, there will always be people like him who are still able to find a solid place in the world and can still support themself doing things their way.

I liken this to manga artists who still use pen and paper to draw their mangas even when drawing tablets exist. An example I know is Kuzumi Taiyou-sensei who drew the Umamusume: Cinderella Gray manga that I love. Here is a video of him doing the line work(?) of a panel of the manga.

To me, someone who doesn’t make manga, using a drawing tablet seems like the more efficient way of making manga. The drawing step might be the same, but you don’t have to get your hands dirty from ink. You can use the digital tools to help you with coloring or shading, and you don’t have to risk spilling something on the page and having to redo the entire thing. (You can still spill drinks on your computer and have to redo due to your computer breaking but you get the point.) You don’t have to scan the paper into a digital file, and erasing is probably easier, too.

To me, it doesn’t make much sense for someone to still be drawing on pen and paper when a powerful tool like a drawing tablet exists. Why would anyone still use pen and paper?

I don’t have the answer to that, but I have a hypothesis: Because it’s fun. I also have another hypothesis about familiarity but it doesn’t support my point so we won’t talk about it. I also think it’s the more straightforward reason so I shouldn’t have to explain it.

Fun. What a lovely word. I wonder when was the last time I used it to describe something that I did.

I think a lot of people, me included, have optimized the fun out of making money. Why should you keep it? If you can make more money doing something boringly, then you can use that extra money to spend it on something fun later on. That should make up for it, right? The only one who can answer this is you–the reader. For me, the answer is “not really.” I want to have fun for the most part of my waking hours, so I want the thing that makes me money to be fun, too. Obviously, I’m speaking as someone who can choose. Not everyone can make this choice for themselves due to their financial situation. But for those who can, I’d love to push you towards optimizing for fun, too. Not everything in life has to be hyper-optimized for the max amount of money in your bank account if you’re gonna feel like shit after the work day. That’s your decision. And I think it should be just that–your decision. If you’re dead set on money maximization, then I won’t stop you. But if you’re somewhere in between, then I wanna tell you that it’s OK to slow down to enjoy yourself more. Of course, I’m just a 24 year-old right now so there’s much that I don’t know. However, I know that slowing down and enjoying life more is something I will do. And maybe, so will you. Just take this as a rambling of a stranger on his phone you might walk past on the street.

Back to the title of this rambling, I still want to write with my own two hands. That’s why I’ve decided to spend some of my free time writing again on this blog that I created on a whim. It won’t contain anything life-changing or thought provoking. It also won’t contain ads or any tracker because I don’t like that. To be specific, Cloudflare Pages (where I host this) might have some trackers, but I think it’s not an ad thing so please imagine that it doesn’t exist. It will, however, exclusively contain the ramblings of a (born in 2002) year-old who wish he had someone to talk to but decided to throw his thoughts onto the internet instead of going out, touching grass, and making friends.

I hope you like it here. And if you don’t, you can always just navigate away. The internet is a vast place. You shouldn’t waste your time somewhere you don’t like–somewhere you don’t find fun.