Anyone can be a writer now. True or False?

Two years ago, stringing together five words for a project description felt like a nightmare for most professionals. Now we gladly present paragraphs after paragraphs, laced with em-dashes and punctuation that looks perfect, generated in a jiffy. Yet we still can't tell if any of it is actually right.

Everyone's copying from the same sources and yet pretending to be someone who's always been a master at wording beautifully.

It's just like the time when we learned to pretend "what's a filter? I'm a natural beauty." we sure only fooled ourselves, though.

The Empty Win

You know that maddening part where you just don't know what to write, where you feel like you don't know how to construct a good sentence, but still keep wrestling with the words? That's where thinking occurs.

That struggle is what makes you smart and better in your craft.

But today, even though our sentences come out crisp and ready to go from the AI oven, they don't fulfil us. Why not?

Because you know those words did not spring from your mental landscape. They did not bloom in your garden. They were picked from someone else's and pasted in yours, pretending to have been yours all along.

Premix is a Miss

You could buy a premix and just bake the cake. But you usually don't. You go through all the fuss to buy the best ingredients, sometimes from across the city, follow a good recipe, and hope to create one that's professional and cherished for the effort it's baked through. Why?

Because a cake from scratch is appreciated more. And the thought counts a whole lot.

Because you get to share with people your taste. The ingredients you chose, the recipe you specifically picked out of all the others, and the way you decorated it. It shows a side of you that premix can't.

When you taste a cake baked by me, you get to become curious about why I picked almond butter over regular, and why I thought lavender frosting would go well with lemon cake.

These choices reveal how my mind works.

Not just what I know, but how I connect things others wouldn't think to combine. And your choices have got to be different. And if they're all looking the same, it's not a coincidence, it's copying.

Comfort of Copy

When you and your competitor sound exactly like each other, how are you an obvious choice for your customer? If company A writes its sentences in the order 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and you arrange yours 4, 2, 3, 1, 5, it hasn’t made you unique.

Because it doesn't matter whether you put yellow paint first and blue second, the outcome will be green either way.

Don't run in a direction just because you see many others do so. Understand why they're running and then decide. And you'd be surprised to know how few actually know why they're running. Don't be them.

Just like how writing these words, cherry-picked from my thoughts and glazed together, gives you a slice of thewordsandwalls uniquely, may we get to see what you have been brewing, not AI.

When you hand the writing over to AI, producing text feels effortless, but thinking becomes harder.

The mind that chooses to do its own thinking is going to remain irreplaceable for a long time.

Best,

thewordsandwalls