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When I open a link, say on Hacker News, and I see a blog post or a GitHub README obviously written by AI, I feel a few things. I feel offended, because it’s like I’ve been tricked, like the author thinks I’m a rube who won’t notice or mind. I feel sad at how common this experience is, how many people are happy to dump their sewage on the commons and sign their name on it. And I feel contempt for the author, because if you use AI to write, you are a waste of biomass. Let’s not mince words here. Someone who is so eager to replace themselves, that they would have a machine write in their stead, when the machine can’t even write good yet: what do you call that, if not contemptible? It’s like making yourself into a eunuch so Claude can fuck your wife. I block these people on sight.

I see people defend this with: “the ideas are mine, the writing is the AI’s”. I take this to mean they threw a bunch of incoherent bullet points at the AI for it to denoise and render into paragraphs. There’s a few problems with this.

The immediate problem is, as we’ve established, the author’s an idiot. If you are so stupid you can’t even turn some bullet points into prose, then your ideas are probably worthless. I think that’s a sensible inference.

Then there’s this broader, I suppose philosophical problem, of the alleged distinction between lofty “ideas” and mere “writing”, where writing is just a tiny implementation detail. This is a very convenient distinction to draw, because it’s unfalsifiable: if the AI’s output is slop, your “ideas” are still good, it’s merely the writing that failed to convey them in their true form (rather like people who say they’re smart but “don’t test well”: what use is this secret intelligence?).

Now, where are these “ideas”? They are invisible, ghostly abstractions. I can’t look inside your mind fortress and judge your ideas. The only thing that’s empirically observable, that different agents can coordinate on and talk about, is output: the writing.

But say this wasn’t true. Say we have something like a very high-resolution MRI machine, and we know enough neurophysiology that we can interpret everything about the brain, i.e., we can read mental representations from recordings of nervous system activity and structure. These “mental representations”, do we expect them to look anything like logic? Do we expect the brain to have this firm, crystalline ontology, that ideas are sentences in some souped-up first-order logic? Absurd. If we could look inside the brain, to see the ideas “as they truly are”, we wouldn’t find beautiful hard-edged Platonic objects, we would find a nebulous , contradictory mess of memory and feeling and intuition. That’s what our ideas are: not logical sentences but dreams.