If you can’t be bothered to write it, why should I be bothered to read it?

There is a lot of low-quality content kicking around at the moment, especially on LinkedIn. Much of it feels inauthentic and poorly considered. Like somebody asked their LLM to “write me a thought piece about leadership” and then published the first response without reading it properly.

Nobody needs more of that.

But I think there’s much more to AI-assisted writing than this comment suggests.

I’ve been pretty lucky when it comes to writing. When I ran Clearleft, one of my jobs was to be visible in the market. So I wrote articles, gave talks, and tried to share what I believed about design, product and the web.

Back then, I could afford to spend a day or two turning an idea into a carefully crafted article. I was also lucky enough to have people around me who could check my drafts and make them better. Not just fixing typos, but improving the structure, rewriting sections that didn’t quite land, and occasionally removing the odd spiky comment.

As somebody with mild dyslexia, it was also incredibly useful to have another pair of eyes on a piece before publication. Getting other people’s input didn’t diminish the article. The ideas were still mine. The argument was still mine. The experience behind it was still mine.

It just helped strengthen the prose.

I don’t have that same setup now. As a solo operator, I’m no longer inside a company where I can casually ask one of my teammates to edit a draft. I also can’t justify spending a day or two every time I want to turn an idea into something publishable. I have client work, coaching calls, investment work, events, admin, life.

So what’s the right answer?

Keep more of my ideas as rough drafts in my notes app?

Lose a day of paid work every time I want to say something properly?

Or just write less?

When you dig into it, this feels like a hard position to defend. Senior leaders have comms teams. Politicians have speechwriters. Founders have ghostwriters. Executives have PR people, editors and assistants.

So what are we saying here exactly?

That it’s fine for large, well-resourced leaders to publish regularly because they have a whole apparatus around them, but individuals with limited time and no editorial support should stay quiet unless they personally craft every sentence by hand?

That starts to feel less like a defence of craft and more like a defence of access.

Personally, I find it incredibly useful being able to dictate a long stream of consciousness into a tool like ChatGPT and have it create a rough first draft. Sometimes I’ll edit that draft manually. Other times I’ll go back and forth a few dozen times in the chat interface, working on the flow, tone and content until it feels right.

That might still take a few hours. But it doesn’t take the days it might once have taken. More importantly, it helps me get ideas out while they’re still alive, rather than leaving them buried in an ever-expanding folder of unpublished notes.

The other day I was listening to Ben Rhodes talk about writing speeches for Obama, and the process sounded oddly familiar.

Obama didn’t write the majority of his speeches. He had other things to do. But effective communication was still hugely important, so he worked with a professional speechwriter.

That doesn’t mean Obama simply asked someone to “write a speech about healthcare” and then read whatever came back.

He brought the argument, the structure, the tone, the lines he liked, the thing he wanted people to feel. Rhodes would turn that into a draft, and then Obama would revise, push, sharpen, tweak and keep working it until it sounded like him.

So yes, you could argue that if Obama “couldn’t be bothered to write his own speeches,” why should anyone be bothered to listen?

But I think most people would see that as a pretty weak argument.

Because the value of a speech isn’t only in who typed the first draft. It’s in the thinking, judgement, editing, taste, experience and intent behind the final piece.

That’s how I think about AI-assisted writing at its best. As a tool to help people get more of their ideas into the world than they otherwise could. And I think that's largely a good thing.