Koby Lewis

This was written by a human

3 min read

TL;DR: Despite appearances, whatever linked you here was written by me (a human), not AI. I write this way because I think it will be helpful to you, but I don’t want you to think I’m just sending you slop.

Why my email might look like AI wrote it

If you’re reading this, I probably sent you an email. That email was written by me, not an AI1, but it might seem like it has some AI-like features.

  • Motivation: When I use this style, it is because I intend the email to be highly “skimmable”. Your time is valuable. I want you to spend as much or as little time on my email as you feel appropriate.
    • Also, application reviewers have told me that this style is helpful to them!
  • Mechanism: In order to accomplish the above,
    • I put the most important elements in high level bullet points with details and explanations in sub-bullet points. This allow you to only read those sub-bullets if you feel the need to.
    • I put key phrases in bold.
      • This provides anchors while you are reading.
      • It also allows you to quickly review visually to see if you missed anything important.

That said, it’s also possible I have unconsciously picked up some AI-style habits.

  • I spend a lot of time interacting with LLMs.
  • I try to maintain my own unique voice! Feel free to point out to me if you see me slipping into AI voice.

Why I wrote this post

I don’t want to read slop, and I don’t think you do either. But I want you to ready my email! While AI style can be “well-written” in some sense, I find pure AI-generated text to be off-putting. I believe this is because the content of AI-generated text is often not as valuable as human written text. A couple reasons why I’d rather read something written by a human:

  • AI writing is often fluffy, humans tend to be more to the point.
  • There is a nagging concern about hallucinations. Humans can be wrong too, but at least they are wrong in ways that make sense to my (human) intuitions!

Footnotes

  1. I may occasionally use AI to review what I write, but if I linked to this post, that means I at least wrote the first draft myself. At the time of writing this, I also hardly use AI for review, but may sometimes. ↩