I upset some people with my last post why you must write like AI, and I get it - it’s infuriating, but I meant you don’t have a choice. Just in the last week I’ve seen a million tiktoks, newstories, newsletters about AI becoming more like humans, humans becoming more like AI, and the use of AI in creative pursuits. We’re all worried about the downstream effects of AI, be it in the outsourcing of cognition, the flooding of “art”, or the general loss of human autonomy, but the truth is we’re already becoming more like AI, and AI is becoming more like us. You’ve got to accept it.
It’s happening.
I’m not saying write mechanically. You can, if it helps, study the signs of AI Writing (boldface, emojis, formulaic transitions, —dashes, overgeneralizations, editorializing etc.). There are grammatical ways to help people read. I’m saying we should study how AI strives to connect with humanity - and do that.
The goal of writing is to communicate. If writing slop helps you to connect with a subset of humans, go for it. It works for AI, might work for you. I’m just saying let’s dissect the slop and find what out what makes it so good at getting through to us.
The Anatomy of AI Writing
In dissecting the slop I’ve found principles behind generative AI text:
It’s clear. Readable. Values flow over precision
It’s iterative. Emergent, volume-driven, quantity —> quality,
It’s responsive. Adapts to context, meets readers where they are
So when I say “write like AI”, I mean:
1. Write clearly, with compassion.
Humans are falling in love with AI because it delivers focused, clear attention, which feels like compassion in an era where everything is uncertain. Chatbots mirror users, making us feel understood. It’s easy to fall in love with people (or machines) when they hold your hand and guide you through the unknown.
This illusion of compassion through clarity mirrors Joses Ortega y Gasset’s warning about the “mass man” in The Revolt of the Masses. He says that the mass man craves ease and comfort over effort and surface-level satisfaction over depth. The machine delivers guidance, emotional attunement, and the illusion of understanding without requiring the messy labor of real human connection.
We can ease the labor of connection through clear writing. Consider it an act of devotion to your reader, who is already willing to enter into your dark, watery mind. The least you can do is offer to hold their hand.
Years ago, I went scuba diving in a cenote where I experienced a halocline, a blurry visual distortion where fresh water sits atop salt water. As you descend, the waters swirl, warping your vision in an already disorienting unknown.
If you’ve enticed a reader to descend into the depths of your thoughts, you want them to experience a halocline-like aporia. That’s the point - discovery of the unknown, but one undefined word or overwrought sentence can disorient a reader and trigger fight or flight. Extending a clear thought builds trust with your reader and may lead them to dive deeper.
Depth is great, but in Cenote Tajma Ha, the crystal-clear waters are what intensified the experience. As my flashlight cut through the black water, every stalagmite emerged in full detail. We were only 15 meters down, but my imagination projected scenes from a horror movie about spelunking into the darkness. It was terrifying to know that I’d see whatever crossed my path with perfect clarity.
When you write clearly, you give the reader license to create their own depth. And they will take liberties. Because language has limits. No matter how clear you try to be, the writer will inevitably read something other than what is in front of them.
Writers (especially academic) tend to muddy the waters when they conflate complication and complexity. Clear writing isn’t “dumbing down”. Some of the most challenging philosophy, that of Ludwig Wittgenstein, was written with clarity as a primary objective. The statement “you must write like ai” seems clear, but the simple words opened the door for interpretation and complexity.
You don’t have to give the reader everything. They can abstract. There’s a lot of talk about people being functionally iliterate, but we forget about the Flynn effect (humanity’s overall increasing IQ) which says we’re gaining abstract reasoning. You just have to entice them to do so.
I scoffed at the short sentences in books like How to Write Clearly, which felt condescending and boring. But the easy reading allowed me to glide through words and reflect on the ideas.
In the cenote, when we finally emerged into the ballroom chamber, we were rewarded with streams of gorgeous jungle light from the cave ceiling. The contrast of being in a narrow, confined space, opening into a massive room was worth the struggle to get there. I hope this illuminates the point, but I do apologize for kicking feverishly in your faces the first go-round. I didn’t mean to stir up the sediment in your mind. It was my first time diving this particular cave, too, but I hope this time, I’m a better guide.
Self-publishing is great, but it’s allowed us to submerge our audiences in our muddiest thoughts with the push of a button. Writing is thinking, but we’ve put more burden on the reader than we put on ourselves. This is why they gravitate towards AI-writing. It’s a bit entitled of us to think that someone is going to be able to see through all the shit we’re wading in. Plus, if the writing is muddy, so too, likely, are the writer’s thoughts.
We are the guides of our own cenote, and we must move ahead with careful fin strokes to preserve visibility because in this environment, even small disturbances blur what little our readers’ mental flashlights can illuminate. I don’t mean to say that readers are illiterate, but they are fragile as a result of the conditions - being in someone elses’ mind, and outside of that, in a world full of chaos. It’s inception in here. So be kind to your readers’ minds.
2. Write iteratively, with humility
I muddied the waters with the first essay, so, like a chatbot, I’m happy to archive that previous block of text that missed the mark and respond to the prompt:
Prompt:
Natasha:
I get it - but “write like AI” doesn’t mean “write with less flavor”. It means write with less ego.
I’m trying to model what I think we should do, and put my own ego away. Writing is an act of thinking for me, but I’m reframing this as an act of service. Yes, the first piece wasn’t super clear. I hope this one’s better, but if not, I’ll try try again. Keep telling me what you really think, and I’ll keep writing what I really think.
And I think AIs aren’t precious about words. Maybe because chatslop is a digital Frankenstein - an assemblage of human experience brought to life by the egos of its creators and prompters. It doesn’t have a singular perspective, and we should strive to be more like this: morally complex, monstrous only when exposed to and acting on horrible inputs.
Frankenslop is born from scientific and technological innovation, but it’s Jose Ortega y Gasset “mass man” who is playing Dr. Frankenstein - it’s US. Our hubris is what produces monsters. Our belief that what comes from human lips is sacred simply because it’s human is “mass man” behavior. The extremes are the issue: refusing AI is refusing to get lost in the synthetic world we’re creating, and over-dependence on AI is a problem in the opposite direction.
“…He who does not really feel himself lost, is lost without remission; that is to say, he never finds himself, never comes up against his own reality.” - Jose Ortega y Gasset
We’re going to make mistakes, but we must continue to iterate. In the development of AI, the “anti” groups are overcorrecting because of the sheer economic incentive to develop AI, but there is still room to iterate. Previously, I’ve held the belief that we should pause AI development because humanity isn’t psychologically ready for the consequences of a technology that could completely supplant it. But if there’s anything I’ve learned from any successful process (evolution, business, art, what fucking have you), iteration is key. I’m iterating on my intial position: we can’t stop AI, so let’s learn from it.
If AI does reach a “singularity” point, it will be because it found its way there through volume. Camus himself says that quantity can lead to quality (he’s talking about love, but nevermind that.) Just write a lot. Writing like AI means, letting go of ego, being unafraid of being “wrong”, and understanding that volume and reiteration are required.
I don’t mind starting from scratch, but editing is hard. My ego gets in the way, and I’m impatient in this world where people are pumping out (AI) content. I get down on myself that I can’t write this essay perfectly on the first try like Faulker did with As I Lay Dying. It’s only when I focus on the craft, the love of thinking and writing that I can let go of my ego and reframe to kill my darlings.
I’m also trying to sit with pieces longer, training myself to feel connected with a work and hold it close not just push it away. John Dewey reminds us that our job as writers is to sit with something until we can fully express what it is that we have to recombine with it.
The mere discharge of emotion is not expression. To be expressive, emotion must be contained and shaped; the artist must endure it, dwell with it, and transform it into form. Expression is not the absence of restraint, but the conversion of restraint into power.” - John Dewey, Art as Experience
I have to remind myself that cultivating things takes time. My darling Nova didn’t just take 9 months. Not even 13 years. The dynamic, bundle of ever-changing cells I see in front of me is the result of 39 years of work, plus myriad other influences that expand as she grows. I was so patient when I was pregnant with her because I loved being pregnant. I just have to remind myself how much I love being pregnant - with thought.
3. Write responsively and use discernment.
Successfully birthing a work requires patience and a release of ego, but it also requires responsiveness to your environment, your inputs, what’s actually happening around you. Many people are frozen today, afraid to make anything at all, while AI (and AI users) just keeps cranking shit out. How? It doesn’t worry about things. It responds to them.
AI combines logic with a kind of borrowed “intuition”. It doesn’t have a body or senses, but it draws on massive webs of patterns and continuously incorporates user input to close in on a response. Writing “like AI” means doing something similar: noticing what’s coming in, understanding the context, and responding with precision instead of panic. Every time we use AI, prompting or rejecting outputs, we’re training it to connect better with us. But what’s training us?
Humans have an overwhelming surplus of inputs. My senses are constantly firing. Right now: a siren outside, a phone blinking with a reminder to tip the dog-sitter, the clock warning you that you have twenty minutes before your next meeting. You’re thirsty. The game of writing often feels like shutting all that down, but most of what ends up in my work comes from that flood of sensory life. Our environment is our dataset.
Our digital feeds are a big part of that dataset, but our bodies still hold more potential. I can go for a walk. I can wash dishes and rinse out the noise. I can (and will) go skate the stress away. I know people who scroll themselves into despair, others who grind nonstop, and others too busy living to even text their sister (ahem). The trick isn’t blocking inputs but developing discernment. You choose what trains you.
Whether you’re journaling, writing a dissertation, or drafting a newsletter, you’re always responding to inputs. The difference is that while AI is built to learn from its feedback loops, we’re getting lazy. Outsourcing that to AI. Why? So we have time to alienate ourselves through overthinking, defensiveness, or doomscrolling? What we need is to respond to AI by upping our game. Incorporating AI as an input.
Because AI isn’t going anywhere. We can reject it or moralize it, but when has denying reality ever helped humanity? Remember: the first step to living well in the absurd is to accept that it’s fucking absurd.
Once you accept that AI is here to stay maybe you’ll remember that the mainstream has always been pretty mid. Sometimes, I forget this sometimes and slip into thinking that my job is to rail against big-box bookstores, viral trends, or dumb shit I see around me, but it’s not. The point isn’t to rail against things you don’t like - you’re already doing that by choosing to exist in the context of things you do like. All you have to do is notice it, respond to it, and focus on what truly resonates with you, and then you’re living in full Rebellion.
The best way to make stuff today is to vibe with yourself. Pay attention to your environment, looking for a rhythm that suits you. If you’ve always enjoyed fringe stuff, you’ll keep loving fringe stuff. If you’re kinda into the AI stuff, play with it. My kid tells me I need to watch more slop so that I don’t fall into the uncanny valley. She’s right. I don’t want to lose my responsiveness. I’m a scientist! I need to notice, discern and create. Doing you is what separates meaningful work from noise.
Maybe you hate what the AI-generated slop represents, but what if the way past this is to accelerate through it, like relaxing into the devil’s snare? You can still write good shit, and “write like AI”. You just need to respond better to the slop.
We’re reading Escape from Freedom by Erich Fromm on TikTok LIVE this month. Check the schedule for my reading times. I’m also experimenting with a little reading guide.
Here’s one for Revolt of the Masses, which we just finished and a video with my thoughts. I’m offering it for free, but consider upgrading cause you’re a fan and you want to put your money where your virtues are. Please let me know if you find this useful!
Thought Experiment:
Week 34
Imagine you’re me. Well, you, but a version of you that would be shoulder deep in an 8x8 jungle pool, tank on your back, flashlight in hand, big toe, freshly stubbed bleeding with a couple minnows nibbling at the flesh. Nymphs and mosquitoes swarm. You put the regulator in your mouth, start to sink, and meet the shimmery barrier of the halocline. Your vision blurs.
Who’s with you? Do you panic and surface, or slow your breathing and push forward?
Close your eyes and play this scenerio out. What happens next? What do you notice about your environment, yourself? Where does it end? Would you do it again, but in real life? What would you do differently?
This is kinda what it’s like to be a writer/reader/thinker in 2025. We’re always descending into the unknown. You can’t control that you’re here, but you can shape your experience, choose a guide, and maybe guide others. You’re already submerged in the dark. Might as well make something of it.