GenAI makes me a better reader and a better writer
From September 2025
Writing with GenAI
1. How dispiriting find out that the post on LinkedIn that went viral might well be AI-authored. I write all my own copy — for LinkedIn, for the newsletter I send to the McKinsey & Company Technology practice, even the note I send to Brown-RISD Hillel board members.
2. GenAI has become a core part of my writing motion. I’m constantly prompting along the lines of
- “Who originated this idea?”
- “Has anyone ever made this connection?”
- “Can you give me an example…”
3. I try to use GenAI as a mechanism to get to an underlying source, rather than just relying the response to the prompt.
4. GenAI is invaluable for helping me recall arguments and examples from books I read ages ago. It’s been close to 30 years since I read “The Machine That Changed the World.” (If you haven’t please do.) GenAI helped me recall a few points that were very useful for an essay in the “Tech Office Update.”
5. I also use GenAI to edit the final output. It’s invaluable, if I use it with care.
- What’s good: pushes me to put more of the so-what up front, discourages self-indulgent digressions. Also highlights overly complicated constructions.
- What’s bad: pushes me to flatten and dumb-down my writing. Hates anything implied. (Sometimes you have to let the reader do a little work.) Seeks to eliminate color and indiosyncracy. A LLM-editor world would be a bleak one indeed!
Reading with GenAI
1. Adam -- whom we dropped off for junior year in college yesterday (see pic of coffee shop in Schenectady Courtyard) -- started reading “A Tale of Two Cities,” so I decided to read it with him.
2. Wow -- what a different prose style than you find in some of Dickens other work. If “David Copperfield” is the paradigmatic realistic 19th century novel, and “Hard Times” anticipates the 20th century with its stripped, down polemical prose, “Tale of Two Cities” looks back to the 18th and even 17th century stylistically.
3. Which means I can’t blast through the text at my usual page. Dicken’s here is often indirect and heavily reliant on irony as well as historical and literary allusion. It’s easy to miss the meaning, especially if you’re reading quickly. The ability to paste a passage into ChatGPT and say “explain this to me” is a godsend.
4. Also enriched my reading experience. Between between Lorry, the two lawyers and Manette’s career in France as a doctor, Dickens seems to be communicating something about the idea of professionalism, as well as its limitations. When I asked ChatGPT whether academics had written about the idea of professionalism in “Tale,” it responded: not very much; there was much more focus on the depiction of professionalism in, for example, “Bleak House”
5. I’ve several discussions with academics at a number of institutions who worry that ChatGPT means students won’t learn anything. Just imagine the reverse case -- the student who can more easily engage with hard texts! Perhaps, even more than now, motivation and curiosity will become the most important superpowers.
6. The isn’t only relevant in school. We all have to metabolize massive amounts of information -- I’m certainly not smart enough to understand all the text thrown at me. I suspect the opacity of institution-specific text will become incredibly important in coming years. Companies will need to figure the right mechanisms for incorporating corporate context so that managers will be able to prompt: “what does this mean” when reviewing a business strategy, investment case or operational plan.