Generation Is Cheap Now, Judgement Isn’t
There’s a line I keep coming back to when people ask whether AI is a threat to technical writing. Producing text has become cheap. Deciding whether that text is right, whether it’s needed at all, whether it’s in the right place, has not. Those were always different skills. They just used to arrive bundled together, […]
Same Road, Different Technology
There’s always someone announcing that AI writing is slop. Usually in a comment, usually with some variation of “you can always tell”. I read a lot of those. What strikes me isn’t the argument, since the argument is mostly aesthetic. It’s how familiar the shape of it is. Every significant tool change gets the same […]
Yes, AI Helped Write This. I’ve Been a Technical Writer for 20 Years.
Let’s get the objection out of the way first. Yes, AI helped produce this article. I’ve been a technical writer on and off for nearly 20 years. Government, healthcare, finance, aviation, telecommunications. I use these tools daily. I use them deliberately, without guilt. The argument against doing so doesn’t hold up well, so it’s worth […]
What AI Actually Changed About Technical Writing
The prediction was that AI would make technical writers unnecessary. A few years in, that hasn’t happened. What has happened is that the slow parts of the job got considerably faster. Research, note taking, first drafts, restructuring, and reformatting. All of that used to take hours. Now it takes minutes, which is a real change […]