13 Beliefs About AI Writing

Writers in our How We Write Now series have drawn very different lines around AI. Some use it for research and editing but won’t let it write a sentence. Mike Taylor will. He uses models to draft almost everything he publishes. His test is whether he could defend the ideas if a reader showed up to argue.

Mike shares the 13 beliefs behind that. He puts more of his own material into the prompt than he asks the model to write. He keeps social posts entirely his own. Some of this cuts against how most of the series’ writers work, which is what makes it worth reading.—Kate Lee

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I just finished my second book with publisher O’Reilly, who doesn’t allow using AI to write, and it’s the last thing I’ll agree to write manually. Writing the traditional way feels like using a typewriter when I have a word processor, and the output isn’t any better than what I write with AI.

I’ve been experimenting with AI writing since GPT-3 came out in 2020, when Copy.ai was giving out free accounts to everyone who failed to get into Y Combinator. When GPT-4 came out in 2023, I developed a writing process that passed the Turing test: friends and colleagues couldn’t tell it wasn’t me, and that was depressing enough that I stopped writing.

Today I write more than ever, because I’ve developed a series of beliefs about AI writing that have moved me from “this is slop” to “ok not bad” and now “this is better.” If you’ve experimented with AI writing in the past and stopped because it felt unethical, I hope this makes you reconsider.

1. The prompt should be larger than the output. Put more of your information into the prompt than you ask the model to write. A detailed prompt with your own source material leaves less room for the AI to inject ideas you can’t defend. The balance between what you put in and what comes out is the distillation ratio.
2. Write what’s not in the training data. If ChatGPT could have written it, don’t bother—someone could just ask ChatGPT. Language models generate text by predicting the next token from patterns in existing writing; without firsthand material they remix what’s already been said. Write up experiments nobody else has run, experiences only you have had, or problems you’ve solved when the usual advice failed.
3. Posts exist to attract people who share your ideas. You can get AI to write posts people don’t realize were AI-written, but when someone comes to you to discuss things you’ve “written” and you don’t recognize the ideas, you can’t have the conversation the post was meant to start. If the ideas aren’t yours, there’s no point publishing.
4. Conviction determines difficulty. Ideas you’ve lived and genuinely believe tend to fall out of you in one go. When you’re less sure of the ideas, or when you’re writing for people whose opinion matters to you, you go back to the original meaning of “essay”—to try, to test—and agonize, iterate, and sometimes abandon the piece for months. You want to struggle long enough with an idea until it works, without rushing it out or abandoning it entirely.
5. Good writing feels risky. People want to read what you’d tell your friends in private but hesitate to publish. The closer you get to saying it in public, the more exposed you feel—and the better the piece.
6. Keep everything. Make each step non-destructive so you can always go back. Keeping previous versions takes the panic out of cutting hard-won work and makes it easier to “kill your darlings.” Use Google Docs for edit history, keep tabs for source material and drafts—both the model’s and your own.
7. Numbers and pictures matter. A memorable statistic changes minds, and a good image makes your point concrete. Use visuals to break up dense text. Sometimes that means running an experiment because it would make a great chart.
8. Struggle doesn’t correlate with success. One post can get four or 10 times the attention of another, and it isn’t always the one you worked hardest on. Publish more; don’t mistake struggle for quality.
9. Write social posts yourself. Tweets and Slack messages are where long-form ideas start. If good writing feels risky to share with people whose opinions matter to you, you want to feel that risk yourself.
10. Good ideas beat good writing. The vast majority of good ideas occur to people who aren’t writers, and those ideas are lost unless the person happens to have a biographer. Elon Musk’s autobiography would be a worse read than Walter Isaacson’s biography of Elon Musk. AI gives people who aren’t writers a shot at getting their ideas out. For me, it also turns a day of writing into two hours, leaving more time to find the next idea.
11. Write what makes people’s eyes light up. I can’t write well about a topic I don’t care about, but my interest alone isn’t enough. When someone else is unexpectedly more interested than I thought—when a topic keeps coming up, becomes the highlight of a meeting, or catches someone I didn’t expect to care—I know I’m onto something. Advice I’ve already given someone is a good starting point: I know it’s helped at least one person.
12. Live an interesting life. Put yourself in situations where interesting things happen. If the raw material is good, you don’t need to be a great writer for people to care.
13. The models are finally good enough. GPT-4 could write a draft I’d pick over an average human writer. With Fable and Astra, the output is now worth publishing. AI writing gets a lot of hate online right now, but it’s here to stay. Soon, it’ll be preferable to most human writing.

Mike Taylor is the head of evals at Every. To read more essays like this, subscribe to Every, and follow us on X at @every and on LinkedIn.

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