The death of articulation

A genius on the tweets, an illiterate child on the streets

Hello friends, welcome to another week of young man yells into the infinite abyss. I’m your host—jords. Oh fuck, I just used an em dash.

Now you probably no longer believe it is me, because I am using the weapons of the enemy.

This week, I want to reflect on a Tweet I read (I know how it sounds but hear me out).

Joe Weisenthal@TheStalwart

Unfortunately, I think that in the near future, not using LLMs to write for you will be like someone refusing to use Google Maps for directions in a new city. A bizarre idiosyncratic choice that's just completely incomprehensible to the vast majority of people.

1:24 PM · Jun 25, 2026 · 2.46M Views

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653 Replies · 113 Reposts · 2.01K Likes

My first reaction was one of irritation and disgust. Human communication being compared to GPS function is quite daunting to someone who has GPS-driven brain atrophy.

Here above you can see my full reaction, with the final piece of the image being me running to my desk and beginning to violently smack these keys.

This week we saw Stanley Druckenmiller unashamedly admit to using AI to write his op-ed. In a classic finance bro move he even said he was kind of proud. "I write everything using AI now"

To me it was one of the first big steps in the direction of ‘who gives a fuck it’s my ideas behind it, so deal with it’ as a flex.

It has been a quiet endemic underneath the surface for a while now, but it feels like the calculator of the literary world is finally about to have its public rebrand.

What was first advertised as a tool to assist you in research will soon transition to a more efficient way to communicate your ideas.

It’s easy to lean on the calculator metaphor here. That LLMs simply turn written communication into an easy, solved function. But a calculator is something you ask for a result. You type in a question and it provides you an answer.

The argument put forward by Drunkenmiller (or however the fuck you spell it) is that it is his thoughts. That AI helped him write his thoughts, which is true in the same way my parents used to do my homework. Or how my sister once helped me do an assignment while I ate gummy worms and played Modern Warfare 2.

She was communicating my ideas because I didn’t know how to. I had a loose understanding of what I thought but I had no idea of how to piece them together. I didn’t understand enough about the topic, so she filled in the gaps.

This is how LLMs work, they reaffirm us as geniuses while they slowly fill in all the gaps of our knowledge. They prompt us by saying ‘I think what you’re getting at is’ and we respond by saying why yes of course. Instead of checking their work, we simply know they are correct. Because that is how a calculator works, we enter an input and don’t question an output.

As someone with a very good eye for AI writing, I have been seemingly inundated by it. My lawyer replies to my email using ChatGPT and is pleasant enough to remove the em dashes.

For now, she feels it would be inappropriate to send the unedited version to me. But in reality, does it really change anything? Maybe soon she will feel the required effort to edit it at all will be pointless. Perhaps soon she’ll just send me a link to the AI response, or the prompt that I can type in myself, along with the invoice of course.

I have a friend who is one of the aforementioned crazy people who refuse to use Google Maps whenever possible. It is quite painful to watch him go about his life, seemingly in a manner that is much more difficult than it needs to be.

So let’s play out this metaphor. Perhaps I am to become the last Japanese soldier, fighting for a lost cause, many a year from now. But is it a noble cause?

What does one stand to lose when they choose the most efficient path and use an LLM instead of their own words?

My answer, and I don’t mean to sound dramatic (i do), is absolutely fucking everything. Humans are nothing without being able to communicate.

Have you ever been in a foreign country where you don’t speak the language? This is how I see the future of man that is overly-reliant on LLMs to write. A genius on the tweets, an illiterate child on the streets.

Our entire species has relied on the spoken word for existence since…well… since we existed! The issue I think many face when they ponder this dilemma is they equate the written word as wholeheartedly different from the spoken, and it is this that I disagree with.

We do not understand a topic unless we can write about it. If we possess less ability to articulate an opinion, we are less likely to be able to convince another of it.

The art of persuasion, negotiation, love, music—these all rely on us to be able to use our words. I know, I’m saying use your words like we do to toddlers, because this is what I fear we will essentially become.

We will become a room of children staring at phones waiting until we can retreat to the comfort of our pocket brains in order to sound human again on the internet.

Now we can discuss what happens to the internet if it becomes a massive treasure trove, wait, that’s not the right word. If it becomes a massive compost heap of AI slop and people who think they can still think.

The first thing that happens is, like in every other technology, there will be an extremely high reliance on a few companies that will essentially puppet master the entire world’s consciousness. Even the slightest, 0.000001% tweak in algorithm (private companies btw) can result in tidal shifts of thoughts, beliefs, riots, political upheaval.

The second thing that happens is we all become extremely fucking predictable. A dictator’s wet dream is to have a predictable population. It makes knowing what buttons to press an easy task.

We need the long tail of the weird and the strange, the distribution curve needs to start all the way to the left and go all the way to the right.

LLMs are a blackhole that pulls us toward a predictable and robotic centre, one where we can be moulded to feed the machine. Insert one of a billion Matrix Metaphors.

So, where do all my man-made™ words lead us to now? I think the Tweet is unfortunately, most likely, quite true. I see a future where the use of AI in communication is so normalised that few people see value in trying to add their own voice to what was spat out by the LLM.

Over time, it will become a waste of time and effort to add voice to anything written, to most people. We will see repeated patterns in articles, op-eds, podcasts and all mediums will trend toward prompted outputs.

This will become normalised because it is the path of least resistance. It is the path that the wealthiest people on the planet would like us to follow, so it will likely be.

In the American South there were anti-literacy laws in place that made it illegal to teach enslaved people to read and write. There were fears that if the slaves could read the abolitionist writings then they would revolt.

Someone needed to be writing the pamphlets, someone needed to be able to read them. People are much easier to control and manipulate if they are unable to communicate their ideas. Or if there is no one else who will understand them.

It also reinforced the stereotype of the slaves being intellectually inferior, which was of course by design. By law. We are rapidly trending toward a post-literate society, and that trend will not stop.

There are no anti-literacy laws in place but there is a strong expectation for you to adapt or get left behind. To adapt is to decrease your literary ability. To adapt is to be easier to control.

You will read slop and you will make slop and you will be happy. You will send your AI agent on dates with other AI agents and maybe if the 0s and 1s hit it off, you’ll get on a zoom call.

But enough of the doom, my friends, you want to hear the beautiful part? The absolutely fantastipherous (marked safe from AI) part?

There’s now an edge you can have. A new skill that most of your peers will not possess. One that will become more and more scarce as time goes on. What is that skill you ask? Being a competent human being, with critical thinking skills.

I thoroughly believe that the average high school graduate from 20 years ago would be far more capable of persuasion and communication than that of the college grad in 5 years.

Instead of needing a computer science or law degree, you just need to be able to sit and read for an uninterrupted hour. Instead of learning how to code, you need to not erase what you already know.

It’s time to bring it all the way back, back to where we started. We need to learn how to tell bedtime stories to our kids, and how to debate with one another without yelling or sending a Youtube link.

My dad has always been a wonderful communicator, and I owe much of my abilities to him. He read my last article, Twitter Brain, and sent me this message:

The length, for those curious, was 6 minutes and 57 seconds.

This is a man who grew up with black and white TVs, far before the internet existed or the bzzz of smartphones, but he has resigned to his fate.

Your competition likely grew up in todays environment. They were born into a world that placed value on efficiency at all costs, and we are about to find out what that cost truly is.

Your mission is to make sure your brain continues to work. You must protect your unpredictability. Everything is against your mission. The screen you stare at, the apps you click, the people we elect, those who would rather let the tide take them into the abyss. It is a lonely journey, friends, but it is the only one worth fighting for.

So join me in the jungle, and may we never believe that the enemy has won the war.