On Writing

I’m breaking new grounds with this post: I’m writing about why I write. The topic and tone may be a bit different than usual, but I hope you enjoy this for one reason or another.

AI Is Eating The World

I’ve been keeping a blog on software testing and software development since 2012. I don’t write every day like other (very good) technical bloggers but I have written quite a bit. I’ve also recently starting writing more personal and less software-oriented posts on Medium. Basically, I’ve been blogging online for a while and I’ve enjoyed writing casually since grade school.

So far, it’s mostly worked out. I like to write about various topics, and some people have read my blogs and even commented on them. Everyone’s happy about this arrangement, or at least, no one has seriously complained to me about it.

Fast forward to the past year or two. The hot new technology is AI - mostly meaning large language models from machine learning done at scale. These AIs have come in hot disrupting basically everything you can think of. Whole industries, full-time jobs, culture, copyright, software development: you name it, someone is trying to “disrupt” it with AI. One area that I’ve been watching from a distance is using AI for writing. People have used AI to write school essays for them (kind of bad!) while others use AI to improve their English writing in professional settings because English isn’t their first language (kind of good!). The list goes on. I recently heard of fairly well known writer Paul Ford being told that people have used ChatGPT to write in his style, to which he didn’t seem overly bothered by. It got me thinking: could these AI tools be used write like me?

So I tried it: I asked ChatGPT to write a 500 word article in the style of Simply the Test - the blog you are reading right now - and…it did. It wasn’t perfect by any means, but it was pretty good. It even chose a topic related to software testing without prompting. Reader, I had no idea what to think about this. I’m no famous career writer, but the situation is still bizarre. Imagine how someone like Stephen King feels.

The whole situation got me thinking about writing, why I write, and why other people write. And here we are.

So Why Do I Write?

Like I wrote above, I’ve always enjoyed writing. I’ve always enjoyed reading, but writing down thoughts and ideas has appealed to me for a long time. There’s something about writing that I simply enjoy; putting together a thought and capturing it in a distinct way. Learning to touch type and getting access to computers accelerating things. I’ve always liked to computers for the way you can not just create but also destroy or revert things back should you have the desire. Now, I can just open a laptop, click a few buttons and start typing away. It’s great.

This is why I cannot (cannot!) get my head around folks using AI tools to generate creative writing pursuits. I understand using these tools in other contexts. Many business emails probably should write themselves. Writing essays for a university degree or some course would be much easier if a robot did most of it for you, not that I think this is a good idea or one I endorse. But writing for the sake of writing done by an LLM? I just don’t see the point. Of course book writing has been flooded by AI generated crap and it turns out you can even “write” like well known authors and writers thanks to AI. But my question is: why would anyone bother with this? Why would someone read something a human barely spent any time putting effort into creating, and at the same time why would you create writing out of robotic machinery?

I have never and likely will never use AI-based tools in my personal writing, even as assistance. It just doesn’t make sense to me. It’s not that I’m tool agnostic. I use proselint all the time when I write. Proselint is an automated prose “linter” that checks for things like repeated words, outdated language, and so on. It’s a good tool alongside a spellchecker. I’ve als dabbled with Grammarly, which I won’t link to because I now think it’s kind of terrible, but it’s a similar tool. But the idea of “generating” ideas from some third-party or revising my work according to some trillion-dimensional LLM seems like a step backwards for me. I like rolling around an idea or two in my head, sitting down, and writing it all down. Why would I want to do less of that?

I have considered the idea of writing some kind of machine learning script that will train a model based on my writing and then create some sample blog entry based on parameters. For me that would be more of a machine learning hobby project than a writing project. Ultimately the result would be something I’d still evaluate. If it was good writing, and it totally could be, I’d publish it somewhere noting the process. It wouldn’t be something I wrote, it would be, well, something else. It’s also not something I’d imagine using beyond some toy examples and outputs because I like writing and I like my approach to writing.

Which of course, brings me to my writing approach.

A Little Bit of My Writing Approach

Now if you’ve done any amount of significant writing you may be thinking “actually, it would be great if I could get a tool to do some of my writing for me!” I feel that sentiment. There can sometimes be nothing worse than a writer in the middle of writing (or editing). But for me, writing is all about capturing an idea and getting it into a workable form and then sending it out to the world. That’s the main part I like: coming up with an idea, putting that idea into a concrete form, then pushing the post button. Something from nothing. Words where there were none. This sort of thing. This is also why I tend to write more technically minded pieces. What’s more concrete than comparing two Python build tools or how to use RobotFramework with Sauce Labs? These are tangible ideas brought to a solid, usable form. Maybe these aren’t groundbreaking concepts, but they’re interesting to me and possibly interesting to someone else. It’s still cool to me to have an idea and then bring that idea from the aether to a physical form.

Another motivation for my writing is to include puny titles and quips in posts where I can. Honestly, I would write a whole book just to get a good joke in. Sometimes this works well, and sometimes less so.

I’ve also thought a bit about the process of my writing since I recently moved my drafts to GitHub into a public repo which you can find here. Previously this repo was private but after noticing that now GitHub actually renders Markdown files correctly, I thought “why not” and I made the whole thing public. You can see my commit history, which typically shows 1 file per commit and that file coresponds to a single post on here or on Medium. One could say I’ve made my writing and writing process open source. One could, anyway.

Generally my process is pretty lightweight. I don’t use any fancy editing tools, and in fact am generally not a good editor at all. I’ve written pieces with professional editors and cannot recommend having a good editor enough. They will make your writing many, many times better. Again: I like this setup. I get to pick how I do things and this is what I’m doing. No AI required.

So Why Should Anyone Write?

Why indeed. There’s so much writing out there already, why create more? Mainly because we’re humans and that’s what humans do.

Even if you’ve decided to write a creative blog post or how-to article using a new fangled AI setup, you should still think about why you’re writing what you’re writing. If it’s to check a professional task of a to-do list, then that’s fine: we all have our lives to live. But if you’re doing something for a creative or personal endeavor, take a bit of time to really think about what you’re doing.

I like thinking. It’s an important part of my writing process, maybe the most important. For others, that may be less the case. Someone might want to see the end product on a particular platform or publications, while others might want to have the wording just right. Maybe you prefer writing first and crafting multiple drafts instead of trying to “one-shot” it. But you should probably have a purpose or clear goal for your writing, even if you will introduce machine learning into the process. I really do believe that the process is critical for writing; it informs and gives purpose to the writing itself. Without a purpose or reason for your writing, well, what’s the point really?