Last Monday, billionaire investor Stanley Druckenmiller published an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal titled “Let the Bond Market Speak.” It was a scathing critique of Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and for about twelve hours the financial world argued about bond buybacks.
Then somebody ran the piece through an AI detector and the score came back 100% machine-generated.
By Tuesday, the discussion concerned neither bonds nor Federal Reserve Chair Kevin Warsh.
When asked, Druckenmiller told NOTUS, “Of course I used AI,” comparing it to using a calculator for math problems.
Though the Journal’s opinion editor defended the piece. The internet did not.
The rancor was immediate and total, and so too was the counter-rancor. Like near all things online, it was a classic case of damned if you do, damned if you don’t.
In one camp, the purists will be stuck crunching numbers with an abacus while the tech-enabled use TI-84s to whip up content and ship it out here, there, and everywhere.
In the other, a legendary investor just claudefished the purveyors of “[r]equired reading for leaders of today and tomorrow.”
I want to set the bond stuff aside and take Druckenmiller’s calculator seriously, because it is the best possible version of the wrong argument.
A calculator only speeds up work. It delivers the same exact answer you would have gotten with pen, paper, and a few more minutes. Though the end is identical, the means are very, very different.
That is precisely what writing is not. It is not the transcription of some full-formed thought or highfalutin idea that already exists somewhere in your head, waiting for a faster printer.
As my friend Max so eloquently wrote, “I think I have opinions, but once I start writing them down and have to decide if I actually believe them? Forget it. The thoughts that seem so wise in my head, or coming out of my mouth, reveal themselves as nonsense on the page, like how you sometimes catch your reflection in the side of a glass-walled building and realize just how ugly you’ve always been.”
Writing is the thinking, itself. To wit, not once have I published the essay I initially sat down to write.
The argument shows up during drafting, under the friction of figuring out what you actually want to say, or it never appears at all.
When you outsource the hell that is writing and rewriting and rewriting and rewriting, you have not saved time on the way to your conclusion. You have skipped the very hard work required to have one.
If to write is to understand, why pretend to know by shipping slop? Why pantomime perfect diction and cogent argumentation?
It is tantamount to using Ozempic and claiming you shed the ol’ lbs via elbow grease. I have written before about the Easy Button and the algorithmically-enhanced stolen valor it enables. The Druckenmiller affair is that essay’s thesis with a billionaire backer behind it.
All this brings me to the Trump meme/GIF:
“Sounds good, doesn’t work” is the most concise assessment of AI writing that exists.
Though AI generated prose arrives both polished and confident, it does nothing that writing exists to do:
It persuades nobody who reads closely.
It unearths no truth.
It surprises no one.
It neither believes nor costs anything (and reads just like it).
Don’t believe me? Just ask the internet, which sniffed out Druckenmiller’s op-ed within hours and promptly stopped taking it seriously.
Unfortunately, like most metaphors, this one falls short because AI writing does not even sound good. It sounds like sounding good given how stuffed it is with suspiciously balanced sentences, the rhythm of conviction, and telltale mechanical tics.
Lorem AIpsum
The poison was never forced — it was offered gently, until you forgot it was poison at all.
Real prose runs roughshod and elicits the drag of a meaty flesh grinding against the sandpaper that is specific material. This is because most of writing is no more than simply hitting your head against the keyboard again and again and again.
Per Ernest Hemingway, “I write one page of masterpiece to ninety-one pages of shit.”
Machine prose is what you get when you sand down the spikiness of every specific mind that ever wrote. It is smooth just like a river stone. Everything distinct and edgy and worthwhile has been worn off. It is a Maybach without a motor, a heaping pile of kindling without any sort of spark.
As it happens, Homer provides a template for surviving this mess.1
Ask the average person about the Sirens and you’ll get a story chock full of gorgeous voices, weak-kneed sailors, and ships moored on sharp rocks. Homer wrote something far stranger.
What follows is the actual sales pitch the Sirens make as Odysseus floats past:
No one ever sailed past us without staying to hear the enchanting sweetness of our song—and he who listens will go on his way not only charmed, but wiser, for we know all the ills that the gods laid upon the Argives and Trojans before Troy, and can tell you everything that is going to happen over the whole world.
Most people home in on the beauty of the Sirens’ voices, few recall the perilous promise of knowledge they lob at hapless sailors.
Ask anything and receive a near instantaneous answer. Sound familiar?
Now consider the scenery: Neither wreckage nor storm mars the landscape. Homer simply describes a meadow, piled with fleshy, rotting bones.
Terrifyingly, nothing kills the men who stop. They simply plop down to listen and never come up with a reason to stand again. The song replaces the rowing, and the rowing was what kept them alive.
I have written about the atrophy before:
The muscle that never fires withers and the writer who stops drafting resembles the rower who stops rowing. And cruelly, the machine keeps handing you pages that look like proof you can still write. As Richard Feynman famously declared, “The first principle is that you must not fool yourself—and you are the easiest person to fool. So you have to be very careful about that.”
I’d bet good money the sailors who lingered in the meadow felt very productive till the bitter end.
In his defense, Druckenmiller claimed, “My name is on the piece…It’s my message.”
Per his exact words, the human part of the op-ed has been reduced to the byline. This is the Inverse Mechanical Turk in its final form: the smiling face slapped onto the frontend while the actual cognition is conjured by silicon strings in an Iowa datacenter. If we outsource everything, the world loses not only writers, but also words that actually mean something — our discourse devolves into potemkin bylines written by frictionless ghosts.
Odysseus offers two ways past the Sirens. Unfortunately, only one remains available to us.
His crew took the wax. They rowed past the danger by never hearing it. Though a rather principled abstention, this is nothing short of impossible now because the sirens’ song is embedded in every product we touch. It will reach our ears whether we plug them or not.
This leaves the mast. Odysseus hears every note and pines for the meadow so badly he begs his men to untie him, thrashing against the ropes like a toddler at bedtime. What saves him is that he tied the knots earlier, back when his head was still his own.
So do your knot-tying now, and make them Gordian-esque.
Decide in advance, while your mind and judgment are still your own, which labor you will not outsource.
For me, it is drafting. Let the machines search. Let them check. Let them argue with me. The rowing stays mine, because that’s where the thinking happens, and I would like my name on the piece to keep meaning what it used to mean.
Get to tying, the song has already begun.
Per my about page, White Noise is a work of experimentation. I view it as a sort of thinking aloud, a stress testing of my nascent ideas. Through it, I hope to sharpen my opinions against the whetstone of other people’s feedback, commentary, and input.
If you want to discuss any of the ideas or musings mentioned above or have any books, papers, or links that you think would be interesting to share in a future edition of White Noise, please reach out to me by replying to this email or following me on X.
With sincere gratitude,
Tom
Christopher Nolan just dragged The Odyssey back into theaters, and yes, everyone and their barber suddenly has Homer takes. I leave the film to the critics; I only need one detail from Book 12.
You may want to add the rhetorical trope of anaphora to your descriptions of the new machine writing: three sentences in a row that begin with the same subject or same subject verb pattern: “Machine writing seems self-conscious. Machine writing seems deftly qualified. Machine writing may even sound like real writing. But it’s none of these.”