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Perspective Shift

You read this story from where you sit.
Want to read it from somewhere else?

We'll re-present the same story as a thoughtful proponent of the lost craft frame would. Not to convince you. To let you actually meet the argument.

Choose a vantage
Linguistic homogenization frame
AI is flattening human expression into a predictable, idealized style, with ChatGPT's vocabulary and rhythms seeping into everyday speech and writing even among people who never use the tools themselves.
Lost craft frame
Writing is a form of thinking, and outsourcing it to grammatically polished but soulless machines costs us the struggle, the voice, and the 'good bad writing' that make prose recognizably human.
Authenticity-anxiety frame
As LLM-generated text becomes indistinguishable and ubiquitous, writers and readers are stuck second-guessing every em dash and polished sentence, eroding trust in whether any voice on the page is actually a person's.
Retold from the other vantage
Steelman · slot B
The writing-is-thinking case
A working writer and teacher of writing would argue —
The sentence you struggle to finish is the thought you didn't yet have. When Emily Bender says we lose something every time we hand that struggle to a machine, she's not being romantic — she's describing the cognitive work that writing actually does. What ChatGPT returns is grammatically immaculate and, as Poynter's Alex Mahadevan puts it, soulless: the LinkedIn average, prose with no friction and therefore no discovery in it. I miss good bad writing because bad writing is evidence of a person reaching for something. A culture that optimizes that reach away gets cleaner paragraphs and emptier minds, and the trade is worse than it looks.

If this read like a fair rendering of the argument — even when you disagree — it's doing its job. Steelmen aren't aimed at persuading you; they're aimed at what the other side actually believes when they're thinking clearly.