Why Before How
It’s hard to believe that it’s year and half since I published the first Hello World post. Back then my main goals was to publish the notes I’d been keeping locked in the digital drawer.
Not accomplished. I still have a ton.
Another one was “to practice defining my thoughts in a clear, concise and opinionated way”. This definitely improved in general, but not necessarily by writing blog posts as honestly I just crafted a few.
What’s key for today’s take I also wanted to rip a side benefit of improving my communication skills, including the use of English.
Reflecting on this after a while I have to admit that goals were fine, but my execution - not so much.
How Complexes Compound
Overthinking Trap
I had never felt good at English. Despite having good grades, and friends claiming that I’m at least decent, I always felt intimidated by the possibility of using English wrong, or more so - of others thinking that it’s not good enough. That I’m not good enough.
That prevented me from jumping on many opportunities in the past and prolonged time before I felt like I’m finally ready to become a part of “international communities”.
How this relates to writing? Sometime, in the middle of this journey, I felt that creating content in English could be a good way forward. Maybe, by doing so, I’ll finally make my peace with going public with my English.
In Polish, I’m naturally long-winded, have a decent pen, and can write in casual, unique voice. Hence writing was a natural first pick. It took me a while, but finally I convinced myself to give it a try.
The Curse Of Insecurity
Fast-forward I have a bunch of texts ready. They seemed to be ok, but yet I don’t publish them. I tweak every little detail. Analyze if this doesn’t make me sound stupid or dumb. Think if my vocabulary and grammar is good enough to have it published.
And here comes the AI. Not a powerful as today, but yet good enough to proofread and correct it. And it comes almost free. Here comes the prompt:
Hey AI, here is my shitty blog post. Please make it sound like it was written a brilliant engineer who is native English speaker. Thank you.
Ok, maybe I’m overexaggerating here, but the key part it is that I’ve started refining my writing with AI. As with my low self esteem almost every output seemed to outrule my takes I quickly started digging more:
- Is this article complete?
- Do you see gaps in my thinking?
- Is content flowing naturally?
I even had taken it to extremums like:
- Am I right?
- Do you agree with me?
- Will people like it?
And here please bear with me. There is nothing wrong with asking such questions. The problem starts when you undervalue your own judgement, favoring the external one.
AI Is Not The Problem
In the times we live in the courage to express your thoughts and emotions in an honest and open way is an art of its own. It’s exactly this thing we need way more.
Whichever social media we open, there is a shitload of AI generated posts. Some of them bring value, some don’t. More so, they are often being generated on top of previous generation of texts that also had been processed this way. People use LLMs to prepare scripts for their videos, present their work, and so on.
The AI jargon is becoming part of the way we communicate and I believe that in a few years we will have studies of how our natural languages changed because of certain way of forming thoughts by so called Gen AI.
Is that wrong? It depends. AI is a useful tool in general, but we have to keep in mind that in the end it’s only statistical model that naturally calculate the most predictable output for given criteria. In other words - it’s designed to give you average, and I don’t want to be average. At least not here, on my blog.
What To Do Instead
While it’s easy to state pain points of the AI Era, the solutions are usually tricker to define. That’s because we quickly got used to convenience, and doing things the old way is not as sexy, as having a sparkling article ready in minutes.
My Strategy
I’ll be writing more, fighting the temptation to go the easy path. Not because it’s wrong, but because it doesn’t align with my goals which remain the same as previously:
- I still want to share my learnings, hopefully building meaningful relationships along the way
- When doing so I want to develop my own style of communicating: spoken and written, formal and casual
- In 2027, I want to pass the CPE exam next year, and I need to practice way more
I’ll be reviewing my writings manually, possibly proofreading them with my English teacher from time to time. But first and foremost - I’ll be writing just for the sake of writing.
Going back to the main thesis - yes, I expect that my writing may temporally become worse in terms of language. It may seem less accurate, precise. There might be mistakes, grammar issues, as I won’t be using any tool, except the basic system’s spell checking. I may not cover the topic as fully as I would running a bunch of refinement rounds with AI.
But I can promise one thing. You will hear me wether you like it or not. Let’s hope for the first! ;)
