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.

When I was ten or eleven, I read “Little Women” and I hated it.

Spoiler alert (even though it was published in 1868 so we’re well past the statute of limitations on spoilers), one of the titular little women dies. As a child who had until that point been immersed in Magic Treehouse and YA horse books, I was shocked and devastated. I slammed the paperback shut and told my best friend it was a terrible story and together we disavowed it for a solid decade. It wasn’t until I watched the Greta Gerwig adaption in 2019 that I came back around to it, and now I recognize “Little Women” as one of the greatest, heart-wrenchingly wonderful stories ever written.

What changed? In short, I realized that just because I didn’t like what happened in the story doesn’t mean it was a bad story.

I bring this up now because last night around 1:30 a.m., I finished reading “People We Meet on Vacation” by Emily Henry. Overall I really enjoyed it, but I had a qualm with an unresolved piece of the ending and I was curious if other people felt the same, so I pulled up the book’s Goodreads page. As I scrolled through and read about 50 of the first displayed reviews– a mixed bag varying from one to five stars — I found a lot of the one-star reviews repeated the same things.

Those are totally valid thoughts/opinions that a person can have when reading a book. But opinions about a book are not the same as a book review. Reading them reminded me of little me saying “Little Women” was a bad book because I didn’t like that a character died. Which brings me to my point:

No piece of art is designed to make everyone happy.

(And that’s okay.)

Social media algorithms feed us a steady stream of the exact content we want to look at, made by people who have similar lifestyles and opinions. The more we consume it, the easier it is to distance ourselves from anything that wasn’t made for us. It’s not just social media, either — we have more books, more news channels and more public figures than ever, so we don’t really need to engage elsewhere.

Then, when we come across something that falls outside that bubble, there are three possible reactions (see if you can rank them):

A. Huh, that’s different! I’m going to read/watch it and experience this new perspective.

B. Hm, that’s not for me, so I’ll skip over that.

C. That doesn’t align with what I think, so I’m going to tell everyone including the creator that it is bad and could be better if they had made what I wanted it to be.

(Answer Key: A wins, B is neutral, and C is where we have a problem. With the caveat that this doesn’t apply to, like, hate speech and misinformation. Please report that and scroll on.)

If you think the best book is a dual-POV book, great — write a dual-POV book! Choose to read dual-POV books! But don’t review a single-POV book poorly because it’s not dual-POV.

Similarly, I don’t eat meat but I don’t downvote non-vegan cooking videos that I stumble across. Either I’ll see if I can take what they recommend and vegan-ize it myself, or I’ll just move along.

If something wasn’t created to your specifications, you don’t have to tell the world with a one-star stamp. And if it doesn’t make you happy, that doesn’t mean it’s bad art.

Don’t get me wrong, I love a feel-good piece of escapism media. Give me fluffy, happy books all day. Life is hard and art offers a chance to live different lives and be different people. When you’re immersed in the page, you can fly with dragons, or take down the mafia, or always have a witty comeback ready in the moment your work enemy fires a snide remark. Y’know, aspirational stuff.

But art is also designed to challenge us to consider different perspectives, wrestle with new dilemmas and think beyond ourselves, and that means taking the reader to hard places. “Little Women” wouldn’t have been the book it was if [NAME REDACTED IN CASE YOU REALLY DON’T KNOW YET] hadn’t died. Same with “Where the Red Fern Grows,” “Bridge to Terabithia,” “Black Beauty,” etc. Loss and grief are transformative and crucial to literature as much as they are to life. We grow the most when we’re stretched beyond what we think we’re capable of handling.

In summation:

• Just because bad things happen in the book doesn’t mean it’s a bad book.
• Just because you didn’t enjoy it doesn’t mean it was a bad book.
• And not every thought and opinion needs to be shared with the world. (Yes I understand the irony of me writing this, but you’re literally on my blog, so.)

“oh, you like Elsa and Moana because they’re ‘don’t-need-a-man’ empowerment stories.”

when someone said that to me i bristled, and i said no, but i didn’t have the words to express what i was feeling, why i felt that missed the mark completely. here are those words.

it’s true those are two of the only disney princess stories not centered around romance, but that doesn’t mean they’re about ‘not needing a man.’ the absence of a romantic counterpart doesn’t mean the story is a commentary about the lack of a romantic counterpart, just as many (most) stories don’t include godzilla but the point isn’t that they’re a commentary on the lack of godzilla. 

it’s a mark of our hyper-romantic media environment – specifically the stories we write about and aimed at women – that the lack of a romantic counterpart is even something to note. how many stories told by and about men don’t feature romance? men fight monsters and save the city and rocket into space and discover their strength as part of a team, and we don’t walk out of the theater going, ‘wow, what a don’t-need-a-woman empowerment story.’ we don’t even think about it.

so i bristle at the idea that women’s stories have to be sorted into two camps, ‘falling in love’ or ‘discovering she doesn’t need a man.’ there are so many stories, a large portion of them untold, about women that have nothing to do with the presence or lack of men. and that doesn’t mean anything against men or romance. it’s just saying we can go beyond that.

besides, Elsa and Moana both are technically aided if not outright rescued by men. Kristoff and Maui play pivotal roles in the plot and teach them valuable lessons. the only distinction is that they’re not romantic counterparts for those two heroines, so they “count less” in their stories.  

so in a way, i do love Elsa and Moana because it’s refreshing to see a story centered around personal growth in the absence of romance, but it’s not because the stories are about them not needing a man. there could be a story where that’s the theme, and that’s totally valid. but Elsa’s theme was to show her emotions and embrace how the things that made her different (her powers) were actually a strength. Moana’s theme was trusting her inner strength and protecting the natural world. 

so, sue me.

no, don’t sue me. that’s the opposite of the point i was trying to make.