Part 1: LinkedIn
Hot take.
We’re not building a product. We’re building a platform.
You’d be surprised.
XXXX didn’t start with perfect YYYY.
Think about it.
The objectively best kind of poetry contest doesn’t exist yet. It will be the best despite also being the worst, because it will be awful to behold, but so awful it’s enthralling, compelling, and grotesquely beautiful. I predict it will prove most popular among high school students, who will enjoy the contest both as a way to mock others they see as beneath themselves, but also as a way to vent their fears and frustrations over the impending prospect of one day getting jobs and “adulting”.
The contest? A game of imitation. The participating poets will be prompted with random topics in order to prevent contestants from having prepared all their poetry in advance. Instead, their creativity will be tested as they must come up with lyrics on the fly—on the spot, off the dome, Harry Mack style—but always following the same format, their poems judged on how well they ape the prose of LinkedIn’s insipid, faux-inspiration slop.
While the rest of the world wasn’t watching, XXXX quietly crossed an important line.
XXXX is all the rage these days. I decided to take a peek underneath the hood.
The problem isn’t not knowing how. It’s doing it how you know.
Bequeath me not thy LinkedIn artifice.
Bestow upon me instead thy mutterings of the stark raving sane and insane. Give me the shouts and grumblings of the mad, the bored, and the puerile; give me your gamers, your bloggers, your jokesters and flamers; give me the rough edges of humanity: our disappointments, despondents, dreamers, dramatics, and neuro-divergents; give them all to me and me unto them all before you force me to drink again from fountain of infernal, plastic fakeness.
At least the fake smile of an enemy can hint at the reality of a grimace underneath. An emperor must play the game of guessing which of his lords are loyal, and which are liars, but in truth no lord is ever fully one or the other. An emperor has at most temporary allies, whose utmost duties lie either to themselves or the lands they rule. No emperor would be wise to blindly trust almost anyone at all.
The same goes for any modern employee.
No amount of perception can distinguish the truth from lies, or friend from foes, in this realm of corporate enterprise slop in which nothing is fully true or fully false, and no boss nor underling can be trusted as anything more than a temporary ally.
The advantage of modern life is that we need not face the prospect of deadly and expeditious coup d’etat upon judging our allies incorrectly. The advantage of an emperor is that he may at least savor the sweet victory of watching traitors hang. In the modern workplace, what proportion of toxic bosses ever meet justice?
It’s 2026, and I’m seeing a shift.
Short engagements. Targeted scope. Clear exit.
XXXX isn’t a liability. It’s an asset.
Did you know?
This is a trailblazer moment.
My point is not that the LinkedIn tone of voice is itself bad. The problem is that what’s beneath this tone is nothing more than quicksand. Nobody on this platform trusts anyone else to be authentic, and without trust, no authentic voice can be had or heard.
Voice matters to me.
And what this post is really about is that I’m scared to lose it.
One of the biggest misconceptions in XXXX today:
It didn’t start with me. It all started with an idea.
So I push it.
XXXX ago, I decided to take the leap.
It’s time for a reset.
XXXX starts with you.
Part 2: AInxiety
I wonder whether or not the LinkedIn posts I see were written by ChatGPT, and I realize there’d be no way for me to tell the difference. And I wouldn’t blame anyone for using ChatGPT in this case—I have to think it’s a lot easier than writing corpo-inspiration-speak yourself, and what’s there to lose? (Though maybe I’m underestimating how many people out there comfortably think in corpo-inspiration-speak, and these LinkedIn posts come naturally to them.)
If contributing to LinkedIn slop was the worst of LLMs’ sins, I’d feel much better. It would kind of suck, after all, if advanced AI ended up killing us all.
Which isn’t to say I’m entirely down on LLMs. They are a miraculous technology. Their capabilities are like something out of science fiction, and in the best case scenario, people will find out how to use LLMs to speed up medical research and help the fight against cancer. When I’m already fighting a war to quiet my daily thoughts about the awful possibility of recurrence, this is a possibility that can bring me some small measure of comfort.
But.
Between 2 to 300,000 jobs were lost to LLMs last year, according to this estimate. I work in software, which is an industry that might be impacted by LLMs slightly more quickly and more significantly than other industries if LLMs were to continue to improve (though if LLMs could do everything a software developer does, then they’d be able to do anything—be it law, medicine, or anything else you could imagine that doesn’t require physical labor). The fear of losing my job (or the entire economy falling into a depression) can be a difficult fear to shake off.
And that’s my livelihood, my ability to provide, which should be the most important thing—yet almost as often I find myself worrying about my avocation, my calling as a writer, and the question…
Will I lose my voice?
Specifically: I feel like I’m in a race against the clock. The more time that passes, the better LLMs get, the easier it becomes for Substack posts to get written by AI, and the less likely Substack readers are to believe that any randomly discovered Substack post was actually authored by a human. The more subscribers I gain now, the more I can build up a following that trusts in my voice and believes me when I say:
I use AI to help me research, but I don’t use AI to write my posts.
And I would never.
It would literally mildly pain me to do so. Like watching paint dry. Or worse, like using LinkedIn .
I want people to know that when I write a post like this one, it’s me, not a machine, coming up with all the clever or not-so-clever tricks I had to use to make that post work the way that it does. Me.
Admittedly, it’s an ego thing.
But also, it’s something more than that.
On the flipside of the above coin:
I couldn’t care less to read anything I know to be written by an LLM.
I would have to force myself to care even if it were reputedly history’s greatest piece of writing, so magically excellent it’s rumored to make monks cry, evildoers repent, pandas want to procreate and coma patients revive.
It’s an impulse I can’t rationally justify, but I know precisely why I feel this way.
Imagine you’re on an island, isolated from other humans, and not connected to the internet, but with one TV. It’s also the day of the Super Bowl. Would you rather watch the game on a channel that’s showing it live, or watch a recording of the game a few hours later? If you’re alone, it shouldn’t rationally make a difference.
But it does, because the live experience makes us feel more connected to other human beings.
It’s this desire for connection that makes me automatically shut down at the thought of reading LLM-written material.
As the author of this blog, trust matters to me because I want readers to be able to connect with my work. I know when there’s a loss of trust in an author’s voice, there’s a loss of enjoyment and ability to engage with their work1. The Game of Thrones adaptation is a great example of this: When the show was still following the books, and still good, it was prime fodder for endless discussions and theorizing about past events and future plot points. When the book material ran out and the show went off its rails, that desire to speculate evaporated. Fanfiction aside, why bother coming up with theories when those theories are likely to turn out more satisfying than whatever will unfold on screen?
As slop proliferates on the internet and even here on Substack, how much trust will be extended to me by newcomers to my blog? I can’t stop AI from getting better and I can’t stop people from using them, and that makes me feel like I’m racing against the clock, trying to prove my voice before things get to the point of, “I can’t plausibly deny usage of AI like everyone else is indulging in”.
Part 3: Can anyone lose their voice?
Some might say that it’s not possible for me to lose my voice; I can only lose an audience for that voice. But inherent to the word “voice” is the implication of “being heard”—how can my voice matter, if it’s totally unmoored from others?
If Hayao Miyazaki and his fellow artists at Studio Ghibli created Spirited Away, but then no one else ever got to see the film, would it matter?
In my last post, I argued that G.R.R.M. did a better job at writing tragic, narratively compelling deaths in A Song of Ice And Fire than J.K.R. did in Harry Potter. However, I omitted something very relevant:
Each reader’s experience with a novel is personal. If you feel as if you’re living inside the world of Hogwarts, walking along its moving staircases and smelling its butterbeer, then a death doesn’t need to be perfectly ironic or composed like the solution to a puzzle in order for it to feel real and impactful. After all, in real life, death isn’t a narrative device designed to maximally convey symbolism and meaning. The death of a Harry Potter character matters more to someone more invested in Hogwarts than the world of Westeros. And I don’t think you can really inhabit either world without trusting in G.R.R.M. or J.K.R.’s authorial voices (though the matter of “death of the author” and how you can trust someone as transphobic as J.K.R. is its own can of worms).
If Spirited Away had never been seen by millions, that would be sad. But if it could have been seen by and inspired at least a single young girl, then its creation would by no means be a tragedy. Millions of changed lives is of course preferable, but anything that changes even a single life for the better is a beautiful thing indeed.
There’s a balance of selfishness and selflessness in this universal desire to have one’s voice heard.
There is ego in wanting to be the smartest, or most beautiful, or most respected in some way—the best of your field. But not everyone feels that competitive edge. Not everyone strives for personal success, instead of supporting others. Not even everyone wants to spread their genes.
HYPOTHESIS 1: I think everyone wants to be seen, heard, understood, known. They want their lives to have meant something.
No one understands me better than my loved ones, but what I write can add to that. And if one day I’m not around, this blog could serve as a memento for them. “Will I lose my voice?” The answer for me, thankfully, is a definitive no.
HYPOTHESIS 2: It’s just as human to want to be on the other side of understanding, listening, and knowing someone. To learn about another person, their similarities and their differences. Emphasis on person, since whether or not LLMs are conscious, and to whatever degree they can actually “understand” the contents of what they write, I think it’s safe to say they are not yet people.
And when I think about the possibility I might miss my shot and fail to establish my voice, and that my blog will be drowned in obscurity - I am comforted by great art. I’m thankful for the artists like Vince Gilligan and Hidetaka Miyazaki, who keep making masterpiece after masterpiece, capturing the essence of different aspects of our human condition. The aforementioned Hayao Miyazaki and G.R.R.M. Authors like Ted Chiang, Tamsyn Muir, and Andy Weir. And I’m even comforted by those many lesser-heard voices of serious notes on Substack or silly comments on Reddit—the two sentence horror stories, the bewildered questions on r/OutOfTheLoop or r/eli5, the endless throngs seeking relationship or other advice—and the countless of other voices not yet replaced by bots, not yet succumbing to slop.
This is also true of videogames: If you don’t trust the developers to have done their jobs well, then you’ll be more likely to say “this isn’t fun anymore” and give up rather than continue playing something as challenging as Elden Ring.
Totally agree. The bits I understand, at least ;) And I've also thought whether ' ... maybe I’m underestimating how many people out there comfortably think in corpo-inspiration-speak, and these LinkedIn posts come naturally to them'. I want to give people the benefit of the doubt and if they cannot speak in any other language than the corporate crap they grew up in, then of course I must do that. But I draw the line when friends of mine, who I know very well cannot write to save their lives - and who would admit this to me in person - use LLMS to fabricate an online persona in the style of Yann Martel, or whomever else was plagiarised to give LLMs their voice in the first place. I especially draw the line because they are friends. Because I know their sacred voice, the one that is the same as mine when spoken in the dark, searching for what makes us human and gives us soul, rather than what makes us machine and gives us money.