Mitch's Blog

Teddy (T.M.) Brown

“Sometimes, I think we as writers overestimate how much people care about the quality of writing outside of specific venues like fiction, criticism, and narrative journalism. But the balance of written words produced in the world are not valued for their quality, but rather for their existence. White papers, product copy, SEO blog posts—these are all hypercommercialized pieces of writing meant to one serve specific end purpose: buy this and not that. This is writing as a product and a large portion of that taxomony is, also, already being created by writers using LLMs. The same, to Joe’s point, will start happening to the little quotidian notes we have to send back and forth as part of daily life, the confirmation emails, the thank you notes, the scheduling and rescheduling. I cannot imagine using AI to do any of that, but I also think that a whole mass of people would rather click a button to tell their colleague they’re running 5 minutes late or cancel a reservation at a restaurant. Writing is extremely important to me; that does not mean it is important to everyone.”

…

“Here’s something that I think more professional novelists, journalists, and critics should understand: the vast majority of people who write in a commercial capacity are already using LLMs to help them write both because they’re being told to by management and because it’s a really fast way to turnaround a draft. It’s happening to content teams at tech firms, it’s happening to freelancers working as contractors, it’s happening to large corporate marketing teams who need to churn out copy. This doesn’t mean people just slamming a prompt into Claude and shipping it, but rather that they’re using AI programs to produce the bulk of the work and editing down from there which has become one of the major responsibilities of corporate writers in 2026. I’d argue this is what people should actually be worried about, rather than the glut of shitty stories and novels emerging from people who have no interest in writing to begin with.”

This sort of work has allowed many writers to make a decent living and if it vanishes, those careers go with it.

In the comments, John Warner responds:

“I think what we’re looking at is a shift from needing what I’d call ‘writers’ to ‘automation-assisted text producers.’ The categories of artifacts you discuss lend themselves to automation-assistance in various ways and at various levels. The fact that they’re judged on their ultimate utility to the end audience makes it relatively straightforward to judge whether or not the automation is harming the final product.

“I would argue that the best automation-assisted text producers are likely to have strong writing practices and so if you want to become one of those people you should still learn to write, but the bigger question is whether or not the people commissioning this work will continue to pay for human involvement.”

Anders: “‘Monoculture’ is what it sounds like: the notion of a culture where everyone is obsessing about the same pieces of culture. In my piece about the mistakes people made when they tried to copy Game of Thrones, I mentioned the notion that Thrones was the last TV show that absolutely everyone watched and talked about. Pundits and culture writers have written endlessly about how tragic it is that monoculture no longer exists, meaning that everyone likes different stuff.”

She makes four points:

“1. We still kind of have a monoculture.

“2. We never really did have a monoculture in the way that some people seem to think we did.

“3. The notion of a monoculture feels oppressive and shitty

“4. You can’t separate this notion from questions around representation and assimilation.”

Journalist Jeremy Stern profiles Zuckerberg in depth.
colossus.com/article/m…

The Roman Emperor Augustus is a hero to Zuckerberg, who says Augustus ushered in two centuries of peace.

Many American men are fascinated by the Roman Empire; Zuckerberg may be the only one with the power to do something with that fascination.