Mon Nov 24, 2025
For the past year, I’ve been plagued by a sort of paralytic ineptitude that I suppose one could equate with writer’s block. But it’s more than that, and please forgive me if I find it hard to articulate it as I’m a bit rusty. In the discombobulating future we all find ourselves in, there’s a kind of subversive pressure on writers everywhere to write better than AI can. In a world now full of what has been disparagingly called “AI slop”, to convince the reader that you are indeed human is a burden I never thought I’d ever have to bear.
It hurts. It hurts that there are topics I’ve written here and elsewhere that AI can now write more convincingly than I can. I am also guilty. Guilty of regularly using AI for all kinds of writing tasks I don’t have time for. But that’s not quite right either. I could make the time. After all that’s what everybody did before 2023. The problem is that the lure of efficiency and accelerated output outweighs any desire to start with a blank page.
And let’s be honest - nobody likes the blank page. It’s a daunting and terrible abyss that screams to be filled with words that are agonizingly pulled from your brain syllable by syllable only to form an incoherent mess that needs to be edited two or three more times before it begins to flow and make sense.
The antidote, you may rightly pronounce, is to be vulnerable and authentic and write about human experiences that no AI can duplicate. This is the reason I entitled this post The Buttcracker. My wife was texting about The Nutcracker upon which the phone’s auto correct worked it’s hilarious magic. No AI would have come up with something random like that, right? But, the truth is that AI is really good at faking it. It could probably have written all this and you wouldn’t know any better.
All I can do is promise that I will never resort to using AI to write these posts and hope that you’ll believe me. Now, in the interests of proving I am human, let me tell you about a time before the Internet. A time I got stuck playing King’s Quest III.
It was the late 1980s. A time when Sierra Games was the only company making great adventure games for PC. And the way you got them was by swapping floppy disks with your mates at school. In those days, being a reliable source of games was a legitimate way to boost your social currency.
When you got stuck in a game back then, you couldn’t google it or watch YouTube videos. You had to ask around during lunch breaks at school. But my friends and I just couldn’t figure out how to craft a magic spell you needed to proceed. I even convinced my parents to pay good money to buy the official King’s Quest III Hint Book. As all the hints in the book were greyed out, the hint book came with a cardboard-framed red-tinted translucent film that you had to place on the page to reveal the hint. I was so excited to finally get some answers.
But, it was a disappointing waste of money. Even after scouring through every hint in the book, we still couldn’t find the answer we were looking for. My theory is that Sierra made more money selling hint books than software.
Eventually, through a friend of a friend, we got our hands on what we were missing: a photocopy of the user manual. To combat piracy, Sierra included all the spell recipes you need to progress through the game in the manual only. At first I was angry at the pain Sierra had put me through. But a seed was planted. I had a new reverence for the user manual. A reverence that eventually led me to writing user manuals for a living.
How’s that for a Technical Writer origin story?
So, to return to my wrestle with what it means to be human, where do I go with this blog? Perhaps I’m like Hiroo Onoda, the Japanese soldier who refused to believe the war was over. For 29 years after World War 2 ended, he carried out guerrilla warfare in the jungle, convinced that flyers and letters from family was American propaganda. He finally surrendered in 1974 after being formally relieved of duty by his former commanding officer (who by that time was a bewildered old man who worked in a bookstore).
It’s a war keeping this blog alive. Sometimes you have to know when to give up the fight and surrender. Sometimes you’re fighting in a war that has already been lost. It takes wisdom to know when giving up doesn’t mean you’re admitting defeat - it means you’re setting yourself free.
Or maybe I need to keep fighting. I just need to figure out where to fight my battles. Figure out where AI has already won, accept it, and write imperfect human stories.
Either way, even if posts may be sporadic on here - thanks for stopping by.