ai;dr

Writing is powerful. It’s how we make sense of things. When we take an idea and turn our thoughts into language, we connect dots, form structure, and build a logical flow for someone else to follow. That takes time, effort, and a few rounds of back and forth until we’re actually happy with the result.

Before the era of LLMs, there was a kind of implicit social contract: As a reader of a well‑crafted document, you were pretty sure the author knew what they were doing. If you couldn’t follow a thought or the message didn’t quite land, the author could explain it differently, because they had actually translated their own ideas and views into those lines.

With LLMs, that contract breaks.

Content is produced at high speed, and polished‑looking documents get sent around far more often. The time from “I have an idea” to a 30‑page document has shrunk from weeks or days to minutes. The loop of drafting, reviewing, correcting, and improving before sending something out has fundamentally changed. What used to be effort upfront, shared between author and feedback providers, is now pushed downstream. It’s gone so far that feedback providers often need more time than before, because the “what were you trying to say here?” and “what is this even about?” questions take many more cycles to resolve. Fixing a hallucinated, poorly structured document full of buzzwords and platitudes takes longer than writing it properly from scratch.

And even then, feedback can’t fully fix it, so the AI slop still lands on the reader’s desk. We’ve all seen this. In the worst cases, because the document sounds polished and looks well‑written, people skip feedback entirely and just push it along to readers.

The back-of-the-envelope math is simple. The larger the audience, the more expensive bad writing becomes. Every vague paragraph, every fuzzy argument, every hallucinated claim multiplies with the readers' time. It may save the author an hour, but it burns through hours of collective attention on the readers.

So in a nutshell: if someone can't be bothered to write, why should we bother to read?

Let's all pause for a moment and notice how we use AI. Use it responsibly. Respect your readers' time... And don't outsource thinking.