Consider how writing used to work.
For most of human history, a writer was responsible for every single letter. You carved ink onto parchment or paper by hand. If you made a mistake on letter fifty of a page, you either lived with the blemish or threw the leaf away.
Then came the typewriter. Suddenly, you weren't drawing characters; you were striking keys. The unit of human effort shifted from the letter to the word. Writers still had to spell, and they still made mechanical typos, but the friction dropped by an order of magnitude.
Word processors came next. Spelling and formatting ceased to be physical constraints. You could make a mistake and correct it invisibly.
Then search engines and the web arrived. Research, which used to require sitting in a physical library leafing through index cards, became near-instantaneous. You could find someone else’s sentence, absorb it, modify it, and weave it into your own essay in seconds.
The Shift to Ideas
Around 2023, the unit of effort changed again. Language models appeared, and for the first time, you no longer had to craft every sentence. You only needed the idea.
This freaks people out. When anyone can produce ten thousand plausible-sounding words in ten seconds, the immediate reaction is to assume that writing has been ruined, or that books generated with AI are inherently worthless.
"The AI wrote it," people say dismissively. But this misses what is actually happening.
Think of an idea as a seed. A sunflower seed contains a certain set of possibilities within its DNA. Some seeds will grow into giant plants; others will remain small, no matter how much water you give them. The seed determines the upper bound.
In a world with language models, the LLM is an accelerant. It acts like sunlight and water at super-human scale, allowing a seed to sprout into a full draft almost instantly.
The catch is that everyone has access to the exact same accelerant.
When everyone commands the same powerful generation tools, the bottleneck moves. It no longer matters who can type fastest or who possesses the largest vocabulary. The bottleneck moves upstream to two things: the quality of your initial seed, and the sharpness of your taste.
What Taste Actually Means
What is taste for an author?
It is the ability to look at ten variations of a paragraph and know instantly which one is real and which nine are fluff. It is knowing what to leave out.
When text was expensive to produce, the physical act of writing forced you to think because you had to slow down. When text is cheap to produce, thinking moves from the output stage to the editing stage.
Instead of being a draftsman, you become an orchestrator. You feed the model your raw instincts, your favorite essays, a podcast transcript, or an obscure historical note. You set the directions and dials. But at every single step, you are exercising discretion.