michael-dean-k/

Earlier today I wrote a sentence, “AI should almost never write your sentences,” and yet here I am now writing a very different one: AI-generated essays could help you explore rogue intellectual questions that don't deserve too much time. If there’s no personal angle, no stakes or tie-in to your day-to-day circumstance, it very likely doesn’t deserve decahours of careful thought. For every 100 ideas that strike me per month, I can possibly give one of them proper care. Maybe 20-30 of them can get a rush job, like this, earning immortal existence as a jotting on my personal website. But for those 70 ideas that would otherwise die, is it not worth seeing if a machine-made essay can spin up something amusing?

For example—after my call with Lily tonight, I wrote down this question: “when and why did China begin its paradigm of distillation attacks?” We only use this phrase now in terms of them quantizing our frontier AI models, but is this not the same strategy of them embracing, optimizing, and cheapening global consumer goods in the 1980s and 90s? When did this start? And why? I first heard this idea on a podcast (forget where); Lily was enthusiastic about the framing, and it got us wondering when the origin of this paradigm was. Beginning of the 20th century? I don’t know if much has been written on it. I’m not about to find out. Yet, I’d be curious to read an essay if such a thing existed.

An essay is, in the end, is the exploration of a question. Of course there are many little decisions that guide how a piece unfolds; the writer has free will. But a great, solid, specific question has some degree of determinism. The essence emerges from the formulation of the question itself. As tech-broish is this may sound, there is an art to prompting—not in prompting an LLM per se, but in shedding through layers of questions to find the real thing you want to know. This was a core idea I learned from my architectural thesis professor: our whole fall semester was dedicated to discovering the question we wanted to answer in the spring.

And so for those abandoned seedlings that would see no light or water if they were forced through the formality and purity of prose on the page—can we not give them life too? Are we afraid that mere exposure to AI writing will leave us intoxicated by a machine muse, leaving us fat and lazy to never writing sentences again? I can't see it, at least not personally. I think there’s room for slow-lane 6-month elaborate hand-written constructions, weekly newsletters, daily logs (like this), and then maybe several “AI essays” per day.

This is a big turn for me! I’m suddenly open to this? I suppose I want to know when Chinese distillation attacks started, and I know if I commit to the theoretical ideal, the maximally virtuous and proper essayistic pratice, prioritizing these 50 hours over all the others things I'm juggling as a parent, I’d destroy my life for no reason. I’m curious, just not that curious. There are only so many essays one can write in a year, in a life.

So I wonder, is there a “hybrid” format of an AI-human essay? I just wrote 500 words here, by accident. Could there be a format that (a) opens with a human introduction—250-500 words to share context, share stories, and arrive at a hyper-specific set of questions—(b) has a middle with 1,000 words or so of AI-generated words, carefully baked for an hour through a multi-step harness, and then (c) a closing 250-500 words of the author’s reaction to that essay. There could even a some visual way to differentiate the two modes of text. I like this because you’re not passing off AI writing as your own; instead it’s a human-machine symbiosis formatted as a Platonic dialogue; you see a mind authentically processing some constellation of hyper-facts, and the response can take any tone—wonder, disgust, absurdity—; it need not be machine reverence.