No sword beats having a sword
Part of AI Era Collection
AI isn't magic—it's a tool. What matters is how you use it.
Lately I’ve noticed I’m using AI less for writing. It’s more for bouncing ideas, structuring, checking typos.
Maybe I’m just tired of how AI writes.
Like “The real problem was never… it’s…” - a phrase that used to feel insightful. But AI uses it so much that I don’t want to anymore. I love writing about “inverted priorities,” so looking back, almost every post has this phrase.
Or those three-line parallel structures. Getting tired of those too.
First time you see it, insight.
Second time, style.
Third time, canned.
Early on, AI helped me output ideas quickly, lowering the barrier to consistent writing. It let someone who’d never written much dare to start writing a book. Good scaffolding. But now I’ve leveled up. I understand my writing style, voice, and expectations better. Not using AI doesn’t seem to matter that much anymore. Might as well just write casually.
Martial arts novels often have those progression levels - like “seeing mountains as mountains” and all that. In The Return of the Condor Heroes, the legendary swordsman Dugu Qiubai’s martial path required users to first master the sharp sword, then the soft sword, then the heavy sword, then the wooden sword, before finally reaching the grandmaster level of “no sword beats having a sword.” (Is “users” the right word here? Whatever, doesn’t matter.)
Am I now experiencing the grandmaster level of “no AI beats having AI” that you can only reach after obsessively using AI? (lol)
But AI is just too convenient. How could I possibly not use it. At most, I’ll just use it less.
Anyway, what I’m trying to say is: maybe in the AI era, after everyone gets used to reading formatted text, writing casually is actually the way.
Or maybe there’s always a higher mountain. AI will keep evolving until you can’t tell it’s formatted at all. Users can also ask in their prompts to please not include pretentious parallel structures.
Or maybe, by obsessing over these formats right now, I’ve fallen into a lower level myself. Who cares how it’s expressed. As long as it conveys what I want to convey.
The real problem was never whether AI writes well or not. It’s whether you’re saying what you want to say in the way you want to say it.
Unfortunately, the way I want keeps changing.