Do you know how much time you have personally wasted on someone else's AI slop?
I I have been trying to count the hours for this video and I am running out of hours to count.
And I don't say that because I don't have a radar for it, but look at X, look at LinkedIn,.
Look at so many places out there where we are wrestling with other people's slop.
And yes, I'm going to include work, too.
Look at work. Look at the last document you got at work.
Is it slop?
Is it just someone else's idea of what AI is trying to tell you about some problem that you assigned back?
It It's completely confusing. It is countless hours.
I I and I'm gonna say countless because I lost count at 100 when I was going back through this.
It is too many hours, especially when you factor in the distraction cost of all of this AI slop where it actually.
Confuses your thinking. It makes it muddier.
It doesn't add clarity. It doesn't move the process of knowledge work toward clarity.
It is toxic to our internet environment.
It's toxic to you. is toxic to me.
You need if you are putting out tokens to respect other people's time, to respect other people's tokens.
And that's what I expect and that's what I want to set out in this video.
In this video, I'm going to talk about the pain that we're going through, how we're all feeling this, and you've probably.
Felt it too. I'm going to talk through in a way I haven't before how I think about authorship.
Why authorship matters in the age of AI.
Why you need to wrestle with what you are writing not just because it's good for you but because it's actually good.
For the process of writing and clarity and communication.
And I'm going to give you a secret.
I'm going to explain.
Why that process itself.
Is.
Not something that AI is good at.
What is the technical issue with AI that means it doesn't do that well.
That leads into why we have AI slop and also.
Why that means we we humans are the ones that need to lead the way on authorship which I think is actually.
Really exciting and empowering.
And then I'm not going to leave you at that.
I'm going to give you not just another generic anti-AI slop skill.
There's a lot of them out there that are actually quite good.
I want to give you.
A special.
Custom.
Skill just for you. Everyone who uses the skill comes out with something different.
It is a voice discovery skill.
I I don't want a thousand people or a million people who sound like me.
I want the internet to hear your voice.
And so I want that skill.
To help you discover.
Your unique voice and put it out there so we start to kill slop one voice at a time.
So that's what we're going to get into today.
I can't wait. Let's jump in.
If you didn't read it, don't send it to me.
Actually, I want to go a step further than that.
If you don't mean it, don't send it to me.
Because it's exhausting.
To fight the AI. It's exhausting to fight for your voice with AI.
It's exhausting.
To wrestle.
With a problem that we all didn't even have to deal with before.
Like, sure, before we had the blank page, but now we have.
What's arguably worse, acres and acres and acres of pages that maybe nobody has read that someone's expecting us to pay attention.
To. It's not reasonable. It's not human.
It's profoundly agentic. And it's not useful.
It's not a part of the future I want to join.
And so I decided to put together a proauthorship skill.
I want something that brings authorship back to the internet, that brings authorship back to what we all want to create together.
Without.
Compromising our ability to work with AI tools.
Because I do love how fast they run.
And what's really important to understand.
Is that slop.
Doesn't make the work disappear.
Slop actually just pushes the work down the stream.
How many hours have you wasted trying to understand.
What someone else spent 30 seconds sticking into Chad GPT or Claude and just said it's good enough.
They got the speed and you got the bill, right?
You got the bill to actually check it.
And so when we read this stuff with our own eyes, when we ask for revisions, when we wait another round, that.
Is something that I want us to keep doing.
We want to keep revising and wrestling.
We don't want the person who receives this to be the first person who reads it because.
Frankly, an unchecked paragraph is much worse than just a potential hallucination waiting to happen.
It's worse than a reputational.
Risk.
An unchecked paragraph that you send down the road is a way of polluting the internet.
It's a way of kicking the can down the road and saying, "I don't care enough about this to actually respect your.
Time." But you, you reader, have to respect my time.
That's not how it works. Now, why does an authorship skill matter?
Why should you care for your career?
If you have an authorship skill, I I'll be really honest.
You should care because you're going to get read.
You're going to get the most precious thing out there, which is human attention.
The agents, they may read anything.
They may may read you no matter what.
But this the only thing right now but the only thing right now that is not changing is human attention.
There's only so much of it in the world and right now we're polluting a lot of that human attention with bad.
Tokens with slop tokens.
If you learn to use an AI authorship skill so your voice is distinctive.
You are going to earn human attention the most valuable commodity in the world.
And that means you're going to have a chance to make your story count.
Whether you're at work, whether you're in interviews, whether you're prepping for a conversation,.
Whatever it is, we all are using AI for these kinds of processes.
And we need something that leads us to not just.
Generic.
AI responses. And you can tell it if you're in an interview.
You can tell it if you're writing reading a doc that someone wrote.
You can tell it if you're reading a website that someone didn't put time into to make distinctive.
All of these little ways.
Tell someone who is paying human attention to you whether you are worth paying human attention to again.
Be the person who's worth paying attention to again.
That's what this skill is for.
I did dozens of drafts before AI.
And I've talked very publicly about that.
This is what we would do when we were writing PR FAQs at Amazon.
I do dozens of drafts after AI.
The only difference is that AI makes every pass faster and I can focus on what I care about in a particular.
Draft iteration until I like what I get.
And so we talk about slop as this universally trashy thing like the same sentence rhythms, the same headings, the same dramatic.
Contrast, the same look in every image and website.
Those patterns are real, but they're just the visible result of a deeper issue.
Fundamentally,.
AI models climb the same hill over and over again.
And I use hill climbing on purpose because these systems have been trained and corrected toward answers that people broadly reward and.
Find successful.
Uh clear, confident, complete, professional,.
Etc. And that's that's useful for a lot of jobs.
It's especially useful if the kind of language you're you're going for helps you get coding jobs done.
But it's a terrible model for authorship because authorship doesn't have one correct answer.
If everyone points the model toward the same general idea of good that works for coding,.
It keeps meeting us at the same sort of trough in authorship.
And that's why we get the same words.
That's why we get the same if x not y and all of these things that annoy us about AI writing.
In a sense,.
We have to nudge.
Pretty hard to get AI to listen to our voices.
Through.
All of the training that artificial intelligence systems have received.
That make them trend toward that AI slap that we hate so much.
And that's ultimately why so much AI output can feel technically fine and still feel like nobody really made it, right?
The pros can look really finished and polished.
And the next person is going to end up treating that draft like an answer if they're not careful or they're going.
To treat it with suspicion if they are careful.
And both of those are dangerous.
And a lot of us are being told we can fight slot by installing this skill or that skill.
And some of those skills are actually really good.
I've installed a bunch of them for the purpose of this video.
Right? So, a good pro skill can catch familiar habits.
A design skill can push a website away from the same template.
And a coding skill can simplify things without adding and adding and adding when it faces bugs.
I absolutely want those things. But one universal.
Anti-slop.
Checklist.
Does not solve the larger model convergence problem that I talked about earlier in this video.
If all of us ban the same phrases or remove the same punctuation.
Uh like the M dash and follow the same taste rules,.
The model is just going to end up converging toward a different hill to climb on and all of us are going.
To end up meeting at the top again feeling tired.
We get the sameness.
We accelerate slop by other means.
I believe the way out is a return to authorship.
And authorship.
Is not a hill to climb.
It's a process.
I don't mean that you have to type every word with your fingers.
I mean that you need to know what you're trying to say.
You need to fight with the work until it actually says it and you need to take responsibility.
For the claims that you're putting out there in the world.
Let authorship be a process again and put AI inside that process as a tool.
Let it be a process and let us recover our voices.
And I think this is bigger than protecting anyone's personal style.
Authorship is about recovering our passion for communicating with each other.
Why I started this channel in the first place.
I have something I want you to understand.
I care whether it reaches you.
So, I stay with the work until it's true enough and clear enough to get that across.
I want these tools to help you stay in the work, not to escape it.
And so, this skill that I'm launching is designed to take the heavy lifting out of the process of defining your voice.
So that you can focus on that authorship piece.
If someone says define your voice, you're going to be like, define it as what?
Right? I could write a complete specification with my own judgment, etc.
Maybe.
But what I really want is someone to listen to me.
Listen to my rough voice notes.
Listen to my final versions. Listen to the places where I change the draft and think about it.
And then help me think through.
What would normally get flattened out in a one-sizefits-all.
Skill. And help me find things that make me feel dynamic when I read them.
Make me feel like, yes, this is something that is accelerating my thinking.
This is something that helps me to express myself.
Um, the skill is not going to make some kind of irreversible pronouncement on your writing voice.
It's actually just forming.
A theory that you can wrestle with and you could improve over time.
About how you communicate,.
How you best communicate in writing.
I I want to read less crap,.
Right? I want to read less stuff that has no.
Substantive.
Value in it whatsoever,.
But is full of nice sounding words and I can recognize it so fast.
And most people the longer they read the quicker they are at recognizing it.
And so.
Just to share with you like my standard.
If you are sending me writing, if you are sending me docs and I by the way I get all kinds of.
Stuff in my cold inbox. So this is not just for people I work with.
This is for the broader internet as a whole.
My status is very clear. Do not send me.
Just.
AI written stuff that you want the AI.
To check with me. That is not worth anybody's time.
And you shouldn't be doing that to your human colleagues either.
Instead,.
Expect.
Conciseness,.
Coherence, clarity,.
Really good written communication standards.
That you would have expected regardless in a workplace or frankly that we would expect if we're talking with a good friend.
And trying to respect their time.
That's the standard we need to have in our workplaces.
It's the standard we need to have when our agents communicate with each other.
And that's something that leaders I think need to especially help set the bar on in companies because right now we are.
Not counting.
A lot of the wastage that goes into processing downstream.
The AI slop that people are putting out there in the name of work.
Like people are sitting there on their commutes.
They're sitting there other places. They're loading a giant document into AI.
You've probably done it yourself. They're processing it through.
They're sending it back and saying this is my response.
But is it your response? Did you actually look at it enough to say, "Yeah, actually that's coherent.
That's what I want to say.
This is where I'm asking you to go farther."
Figure out your own opinion.
Make sure if you're sending something, yeah, sure, you can work with AI on it.
That's fine. But make sure that it's something you actually want to say.
Make sure you would take accountability for it.
And that's something no skill can teach you.
That's something that we need to insist on with each other as a way of rejuvenating the internet.
And I don't think it's smaller than that.
Over half of internet traffic now is AI agents.
Over half of it. It's not going to get smaller.
If we want a future.
Where there is a lot of good writing out there, where there's a lot of interesting writing, where there's meaning being carried.
Through the internet, where our workplaces.
Are full of thoughtful conversation back and forth and debate and sparring and good docs, this is where it starts.
It starts with authorship and a commitment to writing well.
And so that's my ask. You know what?
If you don't want to use my own voice skill, I don't care.
Talk to your AI and work on your own custom voice skill.
It'll probably take you a bit longer, but if that makes you happy, fantastic.
I just don't want anybody listening to this to go back and say, "Well, it's easier."
And I am just going to produce whatever Claude gives me and shove it into the Slack channel for my boss.
It's not going to matter. It does matter.
It costs.
The rest of the company. It costs the rest of your team.
It costs your colleagues. and that when we communicate with each other, we take time to craft and do that.
Well, whether that's through art, uh whether it's through a PRFAQ,.
It doesn't matter. You can spend 57 drafts polishing it and get to something that's really lovely at the end.
And the 57 drafts along the way were how you got there.
They were how that art form took shape.
They were how that that authorship shaped who you were.
Which is why great artists will tell you when they're done with a piece, it is done for them.
And it is living with the people.
Is communicating too, but they've had that exchange through dozens and dozens and dozens of sketches and preliminary paintings, etc.
So,.
This is my challenge for you.
Don't just be anti- AI slop.
Be pro-authorship.
If you don't mean it, please don't send it to me and please don't send it to anyone you care about.
And please don't even put it in cold emails.
We all can do a better job.
Please put down below.
Two things. One, what is your favorite terrible example of AI slop?
Because we need humor in this world.
And two,.
What are you going to tackle first when you're trying to figure out authorship?
How are you approaching this? Because I think that's actually something we don't talk about enough.
How do we write in the age of AI?
What's your favorite tip? What's your favorite trick?
I'd love to learn from you as well.