a writer sharing their take on the rise of artificial intelligence large language models and what it means for the future of B2B thought leadership – how original!

okay so nothing i’m going to say here has never been said.

BUT. there’s so much discourse from all angles, so many takes, that i decided to put my stake down in my little acre of the internet. views expressed here are mine, not my employer’s.

let’s start with what it means to create. to be a writer means to struggle and care too much and endure trials and errors as you discover fifty things that don’t work for every one thing that does. it means there’s a really long, messy middle where it seems nothing’s going to come together. you have to sit and think. a LOT. you have to backtrack, but every word scrapped is still part of the process and teaches you something. the painstaking creation process unlocks more than you set out to do, means more than you set out to mean. you come out the other side with a piece of content and a new perspective.

you can probably see where i’m going with this: using AI to cut out the effort of creating means bypassing all of this thinking, experimenting, trying and failing and discovering.

the effect is twofold.

first, it’s bad for the writing. by nature, LLMs can only recycle what already exists from an algorithm that takes the sum of all its inputs and generates the most expected answer. it’s the antithesis of originality. if the bar is that low for what you’re creating, why bother creating it at all? but fine, say we’re all okay with an internet full of AI-generated thinkpieces that people use their own AI to synthesize and reshare. (i’m not, but stay with me.)

what i’m really worried about is how it’s bad for the writer. the reason LLM use is so enticing is because it removes the struggle from the act of creating. what would take six hours of research and brainstorming could take 30 seconds to write into an AI prompt that spits out 1200 words on the points you want to make.

right now, i’m being instructed to use LLMs for exactly that: the first draft. some people are saying that the human writer is still needed, but that we can come in at the second and third steps to polish the AI, to add in fresh insights and voice and human-ness. i’m being told that LLMs are a thought partner, an ideation tool, a way to make things easy for us. it won’t replace us, it’s helping us!

LOL.

there’s so many fallacies that i won’t get into there (check out all the other thinkpieces that exist) but in addition to all the dynamics related to job losses & chronic plagiarism, here’s what i’ll say:

a writer can’t come in at the second draft and expect to produce work as if they’d started it at the beginning. the first draft is absolutely pivotal, and if it takes the longest to create, that’s because it’s where the actual substance of the work is hammered out. researching and reading and asking questions and building a messy first draft are the bedrock of being able to create something new that’s worth saying. a writer uses their brain to connect all of those inputs and come up with fresh things to say.

without that struggle, nothing truly new can enter the discourse. LLMs will happily regurgitate what already exists, confidently peppering in falsehoods that an unresearched writer/reader cannot detect. it will never say something new. it can never challenge the status quo.

soon we’ll have a drought of carefully crafted, truthful writing that pushes the envelope.

if only there was a profession for that.