The Enshittification of Communication
1,400 comments on my pompous and labored writing
I brightly trotted downstairs for breakfast where my wife had already started her workday. She was sitting on the couch editing a manuscript, sunshine bouncing off her shoulders and chickadees swarming the laurel bush outside the window—but with an aggressive scowl on her face. I immediately assumed that she had been notified of a terminal illness, been charged with a criminal offense, or was reviewing the average price of gas in our neighborhood.
“You don’t look happy,” I said, hoping for an explanation.
“It’s all the same!” she burst out, stabbing at a paragraph on her laptop.
“These authors hire me to edit their books, assuring me that it’s ‘all my voice with just a little grammar check by AI.’ But it’s mind-numbingly flat. Even across vastly different topics, the writing all has the same cadence and tone. I don’t think they even know what AI is doing to their words.”
As a professional editor my wife loves language and everything involved with helping an author to shape and deliver ideas. She asks questions, makes suggestions; there’s dialogue, collaboration, and once finished, they have a clear communication in their own voice. That’s a human editor’s magic1, to work with an author to preserve their style in service of a meaningful expression.
In the case of my wife’s client, however, the LLM assisted text was making it extra difficult to locate a human signal in the word jumble, leaving a frustrated and unhappy editor on my couch.
As a writing coach, it triggered my frustration with LLMs being used for personal expression.
I felt pissed that humans are currently being duped into strapping algorithms to their brain to make a point, heartbroken that the rhythms and textures of language that make communicating a delight are being abandoned, and bewildered by the lack of widespread public outrage as we drown in linguistic sameness and mediocrity as a result. This feeling has been building in me over the last year, but I’ve said little about it, because I’ve felt like a lone, cranky, senior citizen who is complaining about the youngsters who are trampling the flowers of his good old days.
As my frustration peaked, I involuntarily sat down and loaded a rant into Substack Notes and hit the publish button.
“Got that out of my system,” I muttered, while privately anxious about the flak I might catch for being such a curmudgeon.
But I didn’t get much flak.
(Well, a little.)
Like this comment that showed up on my Note from “a seasoned journalist and astrologer,” a curious hybrid of expertise.
Given his qualifications, I was left wondering if I’d already been “pompous and laboured” in my note, or if he was predicting the future likelihood of it based on my horoscope.
But mostly, I got encouragement, comments and support from thousands of writers.
Many of you are new subscribers, here for the first time because of the note. Thank you and welcome!
More than two weeks later, my phone is still lighting up every few seconds with comment after comment by passionate authors in the Substack community.
Here’s just one of over 1,400 comments, from 73-year-old Wendy Elizabeth Williams.
These testimonies have been coming in for days. Here’s two from Sharyn Couper and Ed Mirago & friends.
I’d accidentally created a pop-up community of devoted communicators who rallied together to collectively shout . . .
Real voices MATTER. Give us the unwashed, preciously fresh, grammatically aberrant, biologically backed, run-on sentenced, sun-ripened, spit-covered human word!
My plan is to double-down on the profound impact that authentic human stories have when vulnerably shared, and to remind you (if you’re a writer, coach, leader, artist, or creator) that there are people out there crawling through a desert of content who need the oasis of you.
Like the kind of thirst-quenching word crafting that comes through in this essay written by my friend Camilo Moreno-Salamanca.
Or, if you crave writing that’s so original you’ll lose track of your pomposity then try CansaFis Foote.
The slop wave is coming in. In the face of its relentlessly rising tide it’s now our job to stand as guardians of the human signal with courage, consistency, and joy.
So write your giddy, glad, chocolate-covered face off and hit publish before the robots can sterilize, pasteurize, normalize, and circumcise your god-given syllables for automatic enlistment into the enshittification2 army.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to go respond to a selection of 1,400 comments. One commenter, in particular, will be the recipient of a special reply that is designed to be pompous and labored.
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www.clelialewis.com for those of you interested in human editing services of this nature.
“Enshittification“ was coined by Canadian writer Cory Doctorow in 2022 to describe the predictable decay of media platforms over time.
Aloha Rick… It’s funny, we finally built machines that can write anything, and the first thing we did was make everything sound like the same mildly competent LinkedIn post. Also, I’ll admit: I always assumed “pompous and labored” was a deliberate part of your brand.
…oh how i wish i could be paid to labor pompously…i’m with your wife on the couch, knowing so many of the same writers you do from that ‘ol enthusiasm incubator, nothing made me sadder than during the final cohort sniffinf out well over 70% of the personal essays I was editing were “ai assisted”…it is really sad to see someone lose a voice before they gain one…fwiw i know a handful of these folks who have recently abandoned an ai workflow because they saw how far they had gotten from themself…i heard a slop song playing a drunken poolside hedonistic champagne bath and felt comfortable that this was its rightful home, somewhere forgotten easily with regret surrounded by the distraction of endless loss and distraction…