Companies are spending fortunes installing AI into their organisations. I suspect many are about to encounter a problem they can't engineer away. You see, AI can generate the words, but somebody still has to know whether those words are clear, persuasive, elegant, appropriate, accurate, or simply not good enough. It's what I call the writing and communications layer of AI. The more organisations rely on AI to communicate, the more they'll need people capable of directing it intelligently, recognising weak writing, and improving what it produces. That's why I don't buy the argument that advanced writing and editorial skills are becoming obsolete in the age of AI. If you're a writer, I'd double down on those skills rather than shed them. As AI makes competent writing easier to produce, the ability to recognise and create exceptional writing may well become a premium professional asset.

"When a supported Claude model generates text, it weaves an imperceptible watermark directly into the text itself. You won’t see it, and it doesn’t change the meaning, quality, or readability of Claude’s response." The Claude support pages explain the limitations of these watermarks for identifying who/what generated a text. Source: How Claude marks AI-generated content https://support.claude.com/en/articles/16266773-how-claude-marks-ai-generated-content

Writers talk frequently about concepts like tone, style, clarity, rhythm, and voice. But one important quality rarely discussed on its own is pace. When I say pace, I mean the SPEED at which a piece of writing seems to move. It's related to rhythm, but not quite the same thing. Rhythm concerns the music of writing: the pattern created by sentence lengths, stresses, pauses and sounds. Pace concerns the movement of writing in terms of how quickly or slowly the reader travels through it. Observe the pace here: "The door flew open. Two men rushed in. One grabbed the cash. The other watched the street. Within seconds, they were gone." This is what you might call fast writing. The words are simple, the sentences short. The events arrive in rapid succession. There is barely enough time to pause before the next thing happens. Tabloid newspapers often use this kind of pace. It gives writing energy and immediacy. It pulls the reader forward. We sometimes describe this type of prose as punchy because each sentence seems to land like a small blow. Now consider this passage: "The relationship between economic insecurity and political disaffection cannot be understood solely through fluctuations in household income. It must also be examined in light of the gradual erosion of institutional trust and the perception that established systems no longer respond adequately to individual or communal needs." This writing moves more slowly. The sentences are longer, and the language is heavier. The ideas require more consideration. The reader is not being hurried from one event to another, but rather invited to stop, absorb and reflect. Neither pace is inherently better. A crime report may benefit from speed. A philosophical argument may need more room to breathe. A personal story might race through a moment of danger, and then slow almost to a standstill at the instant of revelation. The important point is that elite writers choose their pace rather than defaulting to it. They ask what speed best serves the material, the moment, and the reader.

We claim we prefer human writing, but in fact we prefer AI writing. From a research report published today. Key Quote "Participants rated the AI-generated story as higher quality and more absorbing [than the human-written story], but they rated the story better on both measures when they were told it was written by a human." Key Unknown When they ran the study. The quality of LLM output changes so frequently, even a few months can make a difference. BBC's take AI stories preferred to human-written ones - study https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c0kmpd6lr80o Link to study https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/judgment-and-decision-making/article/bot-or-not-can-people-tell-the-difference-between-stories-written-by-a-human-or-by-an-ai-system/45E6DC0BB90AA648654D5AE243F6C667

If you could go back and give yourself one piece of advice before publishing your very first book, what would it be? For me, it would be to focus on building relationships with readers from the beginning, not just finishing the manuscript. I'm curious to hear your answer. What's the one thing you wish you had known sooner?