Jerod Santo

Claude's writing style has me on edge

I was enjoying Benn Stancil’s latest column¹ on generalized vs specialized models (his typical, punchy, link-ridden screed) until this paragraph jump scared me:

And that’s the turn nobody priced in. Here’s what the spectrum hides: The real axis was never general-versus-specialized—it was unmonetized-versus-monetized. We called Claude general-purpose because it could be a boyfriend, an essayist, a coworker—because it could be whatever we happened to need. That’s not a property of the software. That’s a property of our wanting. The spectrum isn’t widening. It’s collapsing. The line between the two categories isn’t a line. It’s a clock. Read that last paragraph again and you’ll see it’s a eulogy.

I might’ve audibly gasped. That voice. I know that voice…

“Oh, no! Has Benn out-sourced his writing to Claude?

Then he hit me with this, which made me feel better and worse at the same time:

— ah, what, no, I’m so sorry. Good lord. Do not read that last paragraph again, and definitely don’t try to understand it. It means nothing. It is a quilt of empty nonsense. It is madness that rhymes; it is a Red Hot Chili Peppers song of lyrical non-sequiturs; it is Dr. Seuss posting on LinkedIn; it is the plot to Disclosure Day. The logic does not compile.

Because it is—obviously, I hope; man, I hope—written by AI. It was what Claude, the writer robot, writes when you give it the preceding paragraphs of this post, and tell it to write the next one. Though there may be something profound at the bottom of that repulsive knot, it could also be a maze with no exits, or a Magic Eye that’s just static. There is no way to know, though, because there is no foundational legitimacy behind any of its arguments. Nobody was moved by a thought or a feeling before it wrote those words. They just fell out.

Benn goes on to surmise that maybe Claude’s writing ability has devolved² and maybe that’s evidence it’s no longer a generalized model and maybe that’s a good thing or maybe that’s a bad thing…

But none of that mattered to me anymore because I was too shook³ by what his little rug pull revealed to me:

1. I’ve been talking to Claude too much lately
2. Sooooo many people are letting Claude write for them

#1 I can deal with⁴, but #2 is out of my control. I see Claude’s writing style on Reddit, I see it on X, I see it on Hacker News, and I see it on LinkedIn. I hear Claude’s voice in a house, I hear Claude’s voice with a mouse.

Everything I read these days may have been written by Claude, so I’m constantly trying to determine if what I’m reading is or isn’t and most people don’t have their voice dialed-in like Benn does so it’s not so obvious and this has me on edge because that’s an entirely additional meta conversation I’m now having on top of the actual thoughts I’m trying to read and analyze.⁵

I’m exhausted! Anyone else?