What is happening to writing?

Last week, an essay laying out a case for how AI will change knowledge work went enormously viral on X, where it currently sits at 84 million views:

上周，一篇阐述人工智能将如何改变知识工作的文章在 X 上疯传，目前浏览量为 8400 万次：

I agree with much of it, though parts were overstated and other parts were clearly submarine marketing .

我同意其中的大部分内容，尽管有些部分被夸大了，而其他部分显然是海底营销。

But what was most striking to me wasn’t the content, but the obvious fact that large swathes of it were written by AI.

但最让我震惊的不是内容，而是一个明显的事实：其中很大一部分是由人工智能编写的。

I suspect that the “AI slop” quality was actually part of why it did so well.

我怀疑“AI slop”质量实际上是它表现如此出色的部分原因。

In 2026, we must face the fact that slop is well-liked .

2026年，我们必须面对的事实是，污油大行其道。

Perfectly formatted writing, with statistics ready at hand, copious length, a chipper tone, and lots of antithetical phrasing — the infamous “it’s not that; it’s this” formula — is showing up everywhere for a reason.

格式完美的写作，手头有统计数据，丰富的篇幅，爽朗的语气，以及大量对立的措辞——臭名昭著的“不是那个；是这个”公式——出现在任何地方都是有原因的。

People might say they hate it, and I’m sure many do.

人们可能会说他们讨厌它，我相信很多人都会这样做。

But the truth is that many other readers clearly enjoy this style of machine-generated prose.

但事实是，许多其他读者显然喜欢这种机器生成的散文风格。

That revealed preference worries me more than anything else.

这种显露出来的偏好比其他任何事情都更让我担心。

I learned to read and write quite late (worryingly late, by the standards of millennial parents like myself).

我学会阅读和写作的时间很晚（以像我这样的千禧一代父母的标准来看，晚得令人担忧）。

At age 8, I was barely literate, way behind classmates.

8岁时，我几乎不识字，远远落后于同学。

Something clicked at age 9.

9岁时，事情突然发生了。

I read The Lord of the Rings twice before graduating to The Silmarillion.

在读《精灵宝钻》之前，我读了两遍《指环王》。

Fifth grade was the year of Michael Crichton.

五年级是迈克尔·克莱顿（Michael Crichton）那年。

By age 12 it was Virginia Woolf and Tolstoy — both of whom I barely understood.

12 岁时，我就开始接触弗吉尼亚·伍尔夫 (Virginia Woolf) 和托尔斯泰 (Tolstoy)——我对他们两人都几乎不了解。

But I loved the unfamiliar sound of the words and the unfamiliar sensations those words evoked.

但我喜欢这些词的陌生声音和这些词所引起的陌生感觉。

I loved feeling like I could transmute some of those feelings and images into my own words on a page (I even started a novel, which had something to do with an ancient Egyptian goldsmith searching for his father).

我喜欢这种感觉，就像我可以将其中一些感受和图像转化为我自己在纸上的文字（我什至开始写一本小说，这与古埃及金匠寻找他的父亲有关）。

Writing became something I was self-evidently good at.

写作成为我不言而喻的擅长的事情。

It was the one thing in my life that truly opened doors for me.

这是我生命中真正为我打开大门的一件事。

My first real job after college in 2007 was as an assistant for a crusty New York labor lawyer who wrote exclusively on legal pads and called me “college boy.” He had an incredible memory and an agile mind, but he wasn’t much of a prose stylist.

2007 年，我大学毕业后的第一份真正的工作是为一位脾气暴躁的纽约劳工律师担任助理，他只在便笺簿上写字，并称我为“大学生”。他拥有令人难以置信的记忆力和敏捷的头脑，但他并不是一个散文作家。

That task was offloaded to me.

这个任务就交给我了。

Every morning, the lawyer would toss yellow legal pads on my desk.

每天早上，律师都会把黄色便签本扔到我的桌子上。

It was my job to proofread and “punch up” these rough drafts.

我的工作就是校对和“打孔”这些草稿。

I would toil happily for a few hours in Microsoft Word, usually earning his gruff approval by around lunchtime.

我会在 Microsoft Word 中愉快地工作几个小时，通常会在午餐时间左右获得他粗暴的认可。

Then I spent the rest of the day reading about mellified man and cocaine mummies and the like on Wikipedia.

然后我花了一天剩下的时间在维基百科上阅读有关软化人和可卡因木乃伊之类的内容。

I did well enough at this job that it felt like a viable, permanent career.

我在这份工作上做得很好，感觉这是一份可行的、永久的职业。

Needless to say, that career is gone now.

不用说，那个职业现在已经消失了。

Gemini is at least as good at transcribing a lawyer’s longhand as I am, and Claude will undoubtedly output more perfectly formatted legal footnotes than I could ever hope to achieve.

双子座至少和我一样擅长抄写律师的手写文字，而克劳德无疑会输出比我希望达到的格式更完美的法律脚注。

As a historian and teacher — distinct from my identity as a writer — I don’t experience much of the existential dread that essays like “Something Big is Happening” seem intent on getting me to feel.

作为一名历史学家和教师——与我作为一名作家的身份不同——我并没有经历太多像《大事正在发生》这样的文章似乎有意让我感受到的存在主义恐惧。

As I wrote here , historians rely on non-digitized archives and tacit, often physically-embodied knowledge.

正如我在这里所写的，历史学家依赖于非数字化的档案和隐性的、通常是物理体现的知识。

That is a very good thing when it comes to resisting replacement by the likes of Anthropic’s newly released Sonnet 4.6 model, which is remarkably good at “computer work” tasks.

对于抵制 Anthropic 新发布的 Sonnet 4.6 模型的替代来说，这是一件非常好的事情，该模型非常擅长“计算机工作”任务。

When I think of AI-proof jobs, I think of people like electricians, plumbers, or the surf instructors of Santa Cruz.

当我想到人工智能工作时，我会想到电工、水管工或圣克鲁斯的冲浪教练等人。

But I also think about history professors and anyone else whose output includes some combination of in-person engagement and travel-based or otherwise embodied work in a regulated industry.

但我也想到了历史学教授和其他任何人，他们的产出包括面对面的参与和基于旅行的或以其他方式体现在受监管行业中的工作的某种组合。

No less than a surf instructor, historians are performing physical services in the real world, although we don’t tend to think of it in those terms.

历史学家不亚于冲浪教练，他们在现实世界中提供身体服务，尽管我们不倾向于用这些术语来思考它。

We are going into parish church basements to read through baptismal records, finding weird old non-digitized books in rare book shops, piecing together who called Margaret Mead on a certain day in 1954 by reading through her secretary’s notes.

我们会走进教区教堂的地下室，翻阅洗礼记录，在善本书店里找到奇怪的非数字化旧书，通过翻阅玛格丽特·米德秘书的笔记，拼凑出在 1954 年的某一天给玛格丽特·米德打电话的人。

These are not the everyday tasks of a historian’s life, but they are the kind to things we might do, say, once a week.

这些不是历史学家生活中的日常任务，但它们是我们可能会做的事情，比如每周一次。

Couple that with twice a week in-person classroom time, and I simply flatly disagree with anyone who thinks this combo will be replaced by a Sonnet 4.6-type model, no matter how good it gets at creating Excel spreadsheets, translating Latin, or explaining linear algebra.

再加上每周两次的面对面课堂时间，我完全不同意任何认为这个组合将被 Sonnet 4.6 类型模型取代的人，无论它在创建 Excel 电子表格、翻译拉丁语或解释线性代数方面有多出色。

Anyone who has led a class discussion — much less led students on a tour of Egypt or Okinawa, as my colleagues regularly do — knows that there is a huge gap between solo learning online and collective learning in meat space.

任何主持过课堂讨论的人——更不用说像我的同事们经常做的那样带领学生参观埃及或冲绳——都知道在线单独学习和肉类领域的集体学习之间存在巨大差距。

And although it is possible to imagine a humanoid robot instructor with a brain powered by some future OpenAI model, it is very, very difficult for me to imagine such a thing being both popular with students and permissible within regulatory frameworks.

尽管可以想象一个人形机器人教练的大脑由未来的 OpenAI 模型驱动，但我很难想象这样的事情会受到学生的欢迎并在监管框架内得到允许。

The claim that robot teachers will surely happen someday is one thing, and I can’t disagree with it.

机器人老师有一天肯定会出现的说法是一回事，我不能不同意它。

But culture and regulations change far more slowly than technologies.

但文化和法规的变化比技术慢得多。

Those in the technology sector who are predicting time horizons of a few years for these changes are, I think, confusing the pace of technical change with the pace of social change.

我认为，那些预测这些变化将在几年内发生的技术领域人士混淆了技术变革的步伐与社会变革的步伐。

The image above, produced in 1890s France, was imagining machine-generated education by the year 2000.

上图制作于 20 世纪 90 年代的法国，想象的是 2000 年机器生成的教育。

For my part, I can picture educational systems dominated by robot teachers or even direct-to-brain interfaces by the year 2100, and possibly a bit before that.

就我而言，我可以想象到 2100 年，甚至可能更早一些的时候，教育系统将由机器人教师甚至直接大脑接口主导。

But it’s worth thinking about how surprised the creator of the image above might be to learn that in my classrooms in 2026, I am still using a blackboard and chalk.

但值得思考的是，上图的创作者在得知 2026 年在我的教室里仍在使用黑板和粉笔时可能会感到多么惊讶。

So although I am very sure at this point that AI will be transformative for a broad range of human jobs and interests, I actually think historians and teachers are going to be fine in the medium term of the next couple decades.

因此，尽管我现在非常确定人工智能将为人类广泛的工作和兴趣带来变革，但我实际上认为历史学家和教师在未来几十年的中期会很好。

There I’m less sure.

我不太确定。

Certainly, the bottom will drop out from the lower rungs of eyeball-grabbing written content, from pulpy novels to historical click-bait writing online.

当然，从低俗小说到历史性的点击诱饵写作，那些吸引眼球的书面内容的底部将会被淘汰。

Probably, it already has.

也许，它已经有了。

That GPT-4 level models could passably imitate the imitators of, say, Colleen Hoover or Dan Brown was known to anyone who experimented with them.

任何进行过 GPT-4 级别模型实验的人都知道，GPT-4 级别的模型可以很好地模仿科琳·胡佛 (Colleen Hoover) 或丹·布朗 (Dan Brown) 等人的模仿者。

1

1

These experiments could be interesting, but could never be mistaken for good writing.

这些实验可能很有趣，但绝不能被误认为是好的写作。

The thing is: the most recent Anthropic models actually write quite well.

事实是：最新的人择模型实际上写得相当好。

For this reason, I find myself deeply sympathetic with software developers lately.

出于这个原因，我发现自己最近对软件开发人员深表同情。

Their struggles are my own, just from a different angle: what happens when something you are good at, a skill which is relatively rare and relatively valued, suddenly becomes commoditized?

他们的挣扎也是我自己的，只是从不同的角度来看：当你擅长的东西、一种相对稀有且相对有价值的技能突然变得商品化时会发生什么？

For both professional writers and professional developers, this is not a question but simply a daily reality.

对于专业作家和专业开发人员来说，这不是一个问题，而只是一个日常现实。

Like Andrej Karpathy and others, I find myself deeply energized by the potential of these new tools, while also wondering what their mass adoption will do to everyone’s brains (Karpathy celebrates the “phase shift” in capabilities that occurred over the past few months, but adds: “I've already noticed that I am slowly starting to atrophy my ability to write code manually”).

与 Andrej Karpathy 和其他人一样，我发现自己对这些新工具的潜力深感振奋，同时也想知道它们的大规模采用会对每个人的大脑产生什么影响（Karpathy 庆祝过去几个月发生的功能“相移”，但补充道：“我已经注意到我正在慢慢开始萎缩手动编写代码的能力”）。

On the one hand, I feel a real sense of loss for the world of early 2000s New Yorker style long-form writing and criticism, the world of The New York Review of Books and Lapham’s Quarterly and the amazingly good Dennis Johnson novel I’m currently reading ( Tree of Smoke ).

一方面，我对2000年代初《纽约客》风格的长篇写作和批评的世界、《纽约书评》和《拉帕姆季刊》的世界，以及我目前正在阅读的丹尼斯·约翰逊出色的小说（《烟之树》）感到真正的失落。

Yet I am taking real delight in being able to create truly novel — though sometimes interesting only to me — hybrids of software, history, and writing.

然而，我真正高兴的是能够创造出真正新颖的软件、历史和写作的混合体——尽管有时只有我自己感兴趣。

This Henry James simulator from last fall was, in truth, just the tip of a somewhat obsessive Claude Code iceberg for me.

事实上，去年秋天的亨利·詹姆斯模拟器对我来说只是有点着迷的克劳德代码冰山一角。

Drawing on my earlier work on historical simulation using ChatGPT prompts, I made a full-on history simulator (GitHub here ) which randomly drops you in different historical eras and cultures, with pixel art graphics augmenting an LLM-generated narrative engine which is grounded in real primary sources and a rather elaborate system for generating at least somewhat accurate historical context.

借鉴我之前使用 ChatGPT 提示进行历史模拟的工作，我制作了一个完整的历史模拟器（GitHub 此处），它会随机将您带入不同的历史时代和文化，并使用像素艺术图形增强了 LLM 生成的叙事引擎，该引擎基于真实的主要来源和一个相当复杂的系统，用于生成至少在某种程度上准确的历史背景。

I’ve already used in this in my teaching.

我已经在教学中使用过这一点。

While it’s imperfect, the mechanic of allowing a user to generate a historical simulation based on text input — like “I want to be a salt miner in a frontier province of Ancient Rome” or “1930s Istanbul bike mechanic” or “Aztec farmer with a troubled past” or whatever else you can think of — is fascinating to me.

虽然它并不完美，但允许用户根据文本输入生成历史模拟的机制（例如“我想成为古罗马边境省份的盐矿工”或“20 世纪 30 年代的伊斯坦布尔自行车修理工”或“有着麻烦的过去的阿兹特克农民”或任何其他你能想到的东西）对我来说很着迷。

More on this in a future post.

在以后的文章中将详细介绍这一点。

I tried to make a game called MKULTRA (playable version here , GitHub here ).

我尝试制作一款名为 MKULTRA 的游戏（此处为可玩版本，此处为 GitHub）。

This game is based directly on primary sources relating to George Hunter White’s now-infamous CIA-funded work on dosing unwitting civilians with LSD which I had gathered for my book Tripping on Utopia .

这个游戏直接基于与乔治·亨特·怀特（George Hunter White）现在臭名昭著的中央情报局资助的有关向不知情的平民服用迷幻药的工作有关的主要资料，我为我的书《绊倒乌托邦》收集了这些资料。

As with History Simulator, the text responding to player input here is generating by Google’s Gemini 2.5 model.

与历史模拟器一样，这里响应玩家输入的文本是由 Google 的 Gemini 2.5 模型生成的。

The difference here is that it gets more and more outlandish and surreal as you, playing as a procedurally generated person in 1950s San Francisco, are dosed with psychedelics.

这里的不同之处在于，当你扮演一个 20 世纪 50 年代旧金山的程序生成的人，服用迷幻剂时，它会变得越来越古怪和超现实。

As your “trippiness” meter increases, the UI itself begins to break down and change.

随着“迷幻”度的增加，用户界面本身开始崩溃和变化。

Compare the relatively sober player view at left with the altered one at right:

将左侧相对清醒的玩家视图与右侧更改后的玩家视图进行比较：

Premodern Concordance (live page here , GitHub here ) is the most promising use case for LLMs in historical research that I’ve come up with so far, and something I am currently seeking grant funding for along with my historian colleague Mackenzie Cooley.

Premodern Concordance（此处为实时页面，此处为 GitHub）是我迄今为止在历史研究中提出的法学硕士最有前途的用例，目前我正在与我的历史学家同事 Mackenzie Cooley 一起寻求拨款资助。

As a proof of concept for this larger project, I fine-tuned an embedding model to analyze premodern medical, scientific and natural history texts, searching for non-obvious links between concepts that fuzzily match up across languages and eras.

作为这个更大项目的概念证明，我微调了一个嵌入模型来分析前现代医学、科学和自然历史文本，寻找跨语言和时代模糊匹配的概念之间的非明显联系。

For instance, if you click “piedra Bezaar” on the page below, you end up at a cross-linguistic concordance page for Bezoar stones which tracks mention of them across texts in Portuguese, Spanish, Italian, French and English.

例如，如果您点击下面页面上的“piedra Bezaar”，您最终会看到牛黄石的跨语言索引页面，该页面跟踪葡萄牙语、西班牙语、意大利语、法语和英语文本中对它们的提及。

There’s actually several more projects I’ve been working on, but I won’t bore you with long descriptions.

实际上我一直在做其他几个项目，但我不会用冗长的描述来烦你。

In brief:

简而言之：

• I made an apothecary simulator based on 17th century texts, where you treat patients in colonial Mexico City and potentially get in trouble with the Inquisition.

• 我根据 17 世纪的文献制作了一个药剂师模拟器，您可以在殖民时期的墨西哥城治疗病人，并可能会遇到宗教裁判所的麻烦。

• I made a historical persona generator for use in history classroom activities, roleplaying, and the like, as a spinoff of the larger history simulator project.

• 我制作了一个历史角色生成器，用于历史课堂活动、角色扮演等，作为更大的历史模拟器项目的衍生项目。

• I made a literary canon explorer which contrasts mentions of Victorian authors on Google Books versus their page views on Wikipedia.

• 我制作了一个文学经典探索器，将 Google 图书上提及的维多利亚时代作家与他们在维基百科上的页面浏览量进行对比。

These are all things which, in the past, I would have explored through the written word.

这些都是过去我会通过文字来探索的事情。

Now, I’m exploring them through Claude Code, which I use to write the TypeScript code that summons them into being, and Google’s Gemini language models, which I use to populate them with “speaking” characters for the simulation aspects.

现在，我正在通过 Claude Code 和 Google 的 Gemini 语言模型来探索它们，我用它来编写 TypeScript 代码来召唤它们，我用它来填充它们以进行模拟方面的“说话”字符。

I have greatly enjoyed the challenge of learning how to build these games and tools over the past year.

在过去的一年里，我非常享受学习如何构建这些游戏和工具的挑战。

But it also seems to me that the work I have put into them — the enjoyment I have gained from them — is, in itself, a somewhat worrisome leading indicator.

但在我看来，我为它们付出的努力——我从它们身上获得的乐趣——本身就是一个有点令人担忧的领先指标。

It’s not just that AI slop is replacing some of the lower-rung forms of fiction and prose.

这不仅仅是人工智能正在取代一些低级小说和散文形式。

It’s that the audience share for writing as a whole will be increasingly displaced by interactive “writing-adjacent” things like the MKULTRA game or interactive text-based simulations of life as a Florentine toymaker in the year 1500, or whatever else you can imagine.

而是观众对写作的整体分享将越来越多地被交互式“与写作相邻”的事物所取代，例如 MKULTRA 游戏或基于交互式文本的 1500 年佛罗伦萨玩具制造商生活模拟，或者任何你能想象到的东西。

Gemini’s outputs for these scenarios read like a bad attempt at historical fiction.

双子座对这些场景的输出读起来就像是对历史小说的一次糟糕尝试。

But the dynamic nature of these sorts of tools — their “choose your own adventure” quality — is genuinely new.

但这类工具的动态本质——它们的“选择你自己的冒险”品质——确实是新的。

That dynamism and hand-tailored quality will, I suspect, be more compelling for many than simply reading mediocre novels about MKULTRA or Florentine toymakers.

我怀疑，对于许多人来说，这种活力和手工定制的品质比简单地阅读有关 MKULTRA 或佛罗伦萨玩具制造商的平庸小说更有吸引力。

At the end of the day, I didn’t enjoy any of the projects described above as much as I enjoyed researching and writing Tripping on Utopia .

归根结底，我并不喜欢上述任何项目，就像我喜欢研究和撰写 Tripping on Utopia 一样。

Or as much as I am enjoying starting work on my new book, which, not coincidentally, is about how William James his world reacted to the automation of life and thought in the first machine age.

或者，尽管我很高兴开始写我的新书，这并非巧合，这本书讲述了威廉·詹姆斯（William James）的世界如何对第一个机器时代的生活和思想自动化做出反应。

I miss the obsessive flow you get from deep immersion in writing a book.

我怀念那种沉浸在写书过程中的那种痴迷的感觉。

Such work has none of the dopamine spiking, slot machine-like addictiveness of Claude Code — the rapid progress of typing two sentences into a terminal window, watching Opus 4.6 build a new feature over the course of ten minutes, and then seeing it come to life on a screen.

此类工作没有 Claude Code 那样的多巴胺激增、老虎机般的成瘾性——在终端窗口中输入两个句子的快速过程，观看 Opus 4.6 在十分钟内构建一个新功能，然后看到它在屏幕上栩栩如生。

But the very lack of progress that defines serious writing — the staring at a blank page, the rewrites, the chapters you throw away — feels earned (and therefore intellectually meaningful) in a way that Claude Code simply never will.

但是，严肃写作的缺乏进展——盯着空白页、重写、扔掉的章节——感觉是应得的（因此在智力上有意义），而克劳德·科德根本不会这样做。

“ Cognitive debt ” is a term that software engineers have recently adopted to describe the disconcerting feeling of losing touch with the ground truth of what is actually happening in one’s codebase.

“认知债务”是软件工程师最近采用的一个术语，用来描述与代码库中实际发生的事情的基本事实脱节的令人不安的感觉。

As Simon Willison recently put it : “I've been experimenting with prompting entire new features into existence without reviewing their implementations and, while it works surprisingly well, I've found myself getting lost in my own projects.” It is worth noting that this term didn’t originate in the world of code.

正如西蒙·威利森（Simon Willison）最近所说：“我一直在尝试在不审查其实现的情况下促使全新功能的存在，虽然它的效果出奇的好，但我发现自己迷失在自己的项目中。”值得注意的是，这个术语并非起源于代码世界。

It was coined last year by MIT researchers to describe “cognitive costs” from relying on ChatGPT to write essays .

它是麻省理工学院研究人员去年创造的，用来描述依赖 ChatGPT 撰写论文的“认知成本”。

The frontlines of cognitive debt, in other words, are in the realms of both writing and coding.

换句话说，认知债务的前沿是在写作和编码领域。

I have about 50 ideas sitting in my Substack drafts folder.

我的 Substack 草稿文件夹中有大约 50 个想法。

It is tantalizing to imagine that I could simply open a Claude Code terminal window, direct it to these drafts, and tell it to output a year’s worth of Res Obscura posts.

想象一下我可以简单地打开一个 Claude Code 终端窗口，将其定向到这些草稿，并告诉它输出一年的 Res Obscura 帖子，这是很诱人的。

This, of course, is not a hypothetical but simply what a a lot of people are doing right now.

当然，这不是一个假设，而是很多人现在正在做的事情。

But if you do that, what is the point?

但如果你这样做，还有什么意义呢？

What was I working toward when I was 10, or 20?

当我10岁或20岁的时候我在做什么？

My quasi-obsession with vibe coding over the past year or so — see above — made that less clear to me for a time.

在过去一年左右的时间里，我对氛围编码的近乎痴迷（见上文）一度让我不太清楚这一点。

I was never tempted to use AI to write this blog (something I have never done and never will).

我从来没有想过使用人工智能来写这个博客（我从未做过也永远不会这样做）。

Rather, what did tempt me was the illusion of productivity and innovation that one gets from using AI to create custom software.

相反，真正吸引我的是人们从使用人工智能创建定制软件中获得的生产力和创新的幻觉。

At times, it has felt more productive to produce digital humanities projects and historical educational games like Apothecary Simulator than to put words on a page.

有时，制作数字人文项目和像药剂师模拟器这样的历史教育游戏比在页面上写字更有成效。

As I write that now, I feel some sense of shame, as if I am confessing to having become addicted to junk food or gambling.

当我现在写下这些时，我感到有些羞耻，就好像我承认自己沉迷于垃圾食品或赌博一样。

Is Claude Code junk food, though?

克劳德·科德是垃圾食品吗？

I also spent the past year learning about data taxonomies and single stores of truth and embedding models, and although I have barely written a line of code on my own, the cognitive work of learning the architecture — developing a new epistemological framework for “how developers think” — feels real.

在过去的一年里，我还学习了数据分类法、单一事实存储和嵌入模型，尽管我自己几乎没有编写过一行代码，但学习架构的认知工作——为“开发人员如何思考”开发一个新的认识论框架——感觉很真实。

I also think that at least a few of my projects, especially the Premodern Concordance, are useful tools that I will be returning to and learning from for years.

我还认为，至少我的一些项目，尤其是《前现代语汇》，是有用的工具，我将在多年后重新审视它们并从中学习。

And yet: I miss pre-AI writing and research.

然而：我怀念人工智能出现之前的写作和研究。

More than that, I miss thinking through writing in public.

更重要的是，我怀念在公共场合写作的思考方式。

The novelist Martin Amis once wrote : “style isn’t something you apply later; it’s embedded in your perception, and writers without that freshness of voice make no appeal to me.

小说家马丁·艾米斯曾经写道：“风格不是你以后应用的东西；它根植于你的感知中，没有新鲜声音的作家对我没有吸引力。

What is one in quest of with such a writer?

人们对这样一位作家的追求是什么？

Their views?

他们的看法？

Their theories?”

他们的理论？

The current frontier AI models are fascinating because they are an entirely new kind of tool, untested and unexplored.

当前的前沿人工智能模型非常令人着迷，因为它们是一种全新的工具，未经测试和探索。

They are even more fascinating as implicit puzzles about the nature of consciousness and selfhood.

作为关于意识和自我本质的隐含谜题，它们更加令人着迷。

What they aren’t are replacements for thinking itself, or for the elusive, deeply personal sense of style Amis was talking about.

它们并不是思维本身的替代品，也不是艾米斯所说的难以捉摸的、深刻的个人风格感的替代品。

It’s not just that “writing is thinking” (an oft-repeated phrase these days).

这不仅仅是“写作就是思考”（现在经常重复的一句话）。

It’s that writing is a special, irreplaceable form of thinking forged from solitary perception and labor — an enormous amount of it — but tested against a reading public.

写作是一种特殊的、不可替代的思维形式，它是由大量的单独感知和劳动形成的，但却经过了阅读公众的考验。

That fusion of aloneness and interiority versus togetherness and exteriority is what makes it fascinating to me.

孤独与内在与团结与外在的融合让我着迷。

I fear for a world in which people are simply able to create a simulacrum of writing and of thought by inputting a prompt and singly experiencing the result.

我担心这样一个世界：人们可以通过输入提示并单独体验结果来创建写作和思想的拟像。

In short: the production of writing is deeply solitary and personal, but the consumption of writing is just as deeply public and shared.

简而言之：写作的产生是极其孤独和个人的，但写作的消费同样是高度公共和共享的。

That combination seems to me to be the true negative space around AI capabilities.

在我看来，这种组合才是人工智能能力的真正负面空间。

AI will get very, very good at creating compelling, hyper-customized content.

人工智能将非常非常擅长创建引人注目的、超定制的内容。

Claude Code’s self-evident addictive qualities is a strong early signal of that.

克劳德·科德不言而喻的令人上瘾的品质是一个强烈的早期信号。

It will not, I suspect, get good at creating the public debates and shared intellectual communion that characterize great literature and great historical writing.

我怀疑，它不会擅长创造伟大文学和伟大历史写作所特有的公开辩论和知识共享。

And it certainly won’t be able to capture the perception-based, physically embodied sense of personal style and taste that Martin Amis described.

它当然无法捕捉马丁·艾米斯所描述的基于感知的、物理体现的个人风格和品味。

And so, reader: I say to you now, I will keep writing without AI, even as I explore what it’s possible to do with it.

所以，读者：我现在对你说，即使我在探索人工智能可以做什么，我也会继续在没有人工智能的情况下写作。

I will be doing it simply because I enjoy talking to you and thinking with you — not as a solitary individual in a chat transcript but as a collectivity of actual human readers reading actual human thoughts.

我这样做只是因为我喜欢与你交谈并与你一起思考——不是作为聊天记录中的孤独个体，而是作为真正的人类读者的集体，阅读真实的人类想法。

• “Two attempts to replicate Balabanova’s findings of cocaine failed, suggesting ‘that either Balabanova and her associates are misinterpreting their results or that the samples of mummies tested by them have been mysteriously exposed to cocaine’” ( Wikipedia )

• “两次尝试复制巴拉巴诺娃的可卡因发现都失败了，这表明‘巴拉巴诺娃和她的同事误解了他们的结果，或者他们测试的木乃伊样本神秘地接触了可卡因’”（维基百科）

• Archaeologists report an ancient elephant bone which may be the first physical proof of Hannibal’s crossing of the Alps with a troop of North African war elephants — something I am still staggered by whenever I teach it to the students in my world history class ( BBC ).

• 考古学家报道了一块古老的象骨，这可能是汉尼拔率领一群北非战象穿越阿尔卑斯山的第一个实物证据——每当我在世界历史课上向学生们讲授它时，我仍然会感到震惊（BBC）。

My favorite early experiment with getting ChatGPT to write fiction was the prompt “Create a clickbait article about 20 tips for living a longer, healthier life that is purportedly written by a retired cardiologist from Florida, but slowly, as the list progresses, the author drops increasingly strong hints that they are actually a 500-year-old gecko which was somehow transformed into a human being in the distant past, but they never fully reveal this.” I tried this with Sonnet 4.6 just now and it made an actual website !

我最喜欢的早期让 ChatGPT 写小说的实验是这样的提示：“写一篇关于 20 个长寿、健康生活秘诀的标题诱饵文章，据称是由佛罗里达州的一位退休心脏病专家撰写的，但慢慢地，随着列表的进展，作者越来越强烈地暗示它们实际上是一只 500 岁的壁虎，在遥远的过去以某种方式转变为人类，但他们从未完全揭示这一点。”我刚刚用 Sonnet 4.6 尝试过，它创建了一个实际的网站！

My Dad died in Sept 2024 and I was the one to write his obituary.

我父亲于 2024 年 9 月去世，我是为他写讣告的人。

For many days, I could not produce a single word.

很多天，我一句话也说不出来。

I just couldn't get started.

我就是无法开始。

I really had no idea what to write.

我真的不知道该写什么。

My kids and niece all suggested that I ought to use ChatGPT.

我的孩子和侄女都建议我应该使用 ChatGPT。

Feed it the details of his life and let it do the work.

向它提供他生活的细节，让它完成工作。

Perhaps that would have yielded something better, but I simply waited until the words, finally, came forth from my own fingers.

也许这会产生更好的结果，但我只是等待着，直到这些话最终从我自己的手指中吐出来。

Anything else would have felt as if I hadn't honored the memory and life of my father.

任何其他事情都会让我感觉好像我没有尊重父亲的记忆和生命。

I think that was an important choice for me personally.

我认为这对我个人来说是一个重要的选择。

A smart chap once said “For the things we have to learn before we can do them, we learn by doing them.” How many of my cognitive endeavors am I willing to outsource?

一位聪明的小伙子曾经说过：“对于我们在做之前必须学习的事情，我们通过做来学习。”我愿意外包多少认知工作？

And one addendum: Cory Doctorow's enshittification of Internet platforms will leave no stone unturned:

还有一个附录：科里·多克托罗 (Cory Doctorow) 对互联网平台的恶搞化将不遗余力：

https://www.fintechbrainfood.com/p/the-enshittification-of-chatgpt

https://www.fintechbrainfood.com/p/the-enshittification-of-chatgpt

It appears that there are two schools of thought developing, as both critique, practice and advocacy.

似乎有两种思想流派正在发展，即批评、实践和倡导。

One school is AI as an enhancement tool.

一所学校将人工智能作为一种增强工具。

That is very much how you have framed it and how I am also using AI although not in some of the more creative as way as you are.

这就是你如何构建它的方式，也是我如何使用人工智能的方式，尽管不像你那样更有创意。

My own use has been in transcribing 19th and 18th century handwriting.

我自己的用途是抄写 19 世纪和 18 世纪的笔迹。

And in copyediting suggestions for paragraphs I’ve already written.

以及对我已经写过的段落的编辑建议。

I also use it to find things in text different to what I have found.

我还用它来查找文本中与我所发现的内容不同的内容。

The second school of thought is the replacement of humans and loss of skills.

第二个学派是人类的更替和技能的丧失。

This is the worry.

这就是担心。

And it certainly exists, to greater or lesser degrees.

它确实存在，或多或少。

I find it hard to see the copyediting profession being able to be sustained in the numbers it once was.

我发现文案编辑行业很难再像以前那样维持下去了。

But maybe it will enhance the more active parts of our profession, we may spend more time in archives and travelling.

但也许它会增强我们职业中更活跃的部分，我们可能会花更多的时间在档案和旅行上。

Which also leads to major social changes.

这也导致了重大的社会变革。