Pitfalls of using AI for Reading & Writing
An important announcement: I am planning to move this newsletter from Kit to Substack from next week. (Substack has got better engagement options and is more writer-friendly. Kit is better for content-based marketing, email automations, funnels etc., which I realise I don’t use or plan to).
Nothing will change for you! Your email id will be ported from Kit to Substack. You may receive a welcome email once that happens. During the transition period, you might face some issues in getting the emails – maybe the Substack-originating emails may go into Spam or Promotions. Please keep a lookout and let me know if you need any support from the back-end.
Meanwhile, the action on the book is heating up. I’m in the midst of finalising the cover design, and I have also received the first round of copy edits from the publisher. Nervous and excited!
And now, on to the newsletter.
Welcome to the one hundred and nineteenth edition of ‘3-2-1 by Story Rules‘.
A newsletter recommending good examples of storytelling across:
- 3 tweets
- 2 articles, and
- 1 long-form content piece
Let’s dive in.
𝕏 3 Tweets of the week
It seems that in the AI era, Editing > Writing; Auditing > Book-keeping.
Balaji makes a great point about the verification of AI-generated content being the critical bottleneck in scaling AI output.
Loved how Thompson makes a dramatic reveal at the end of the tweet.
Haha, ouch.
Props to the guy who converted 79,187 pages into 14.6 miles. 🫡
📄 2 Articles of the week
a. ‘Captain Gill’ by Sarthak Dev
In the din of the IPL Final (and the tragic stampede in Bangalore), most folks might have missed a monumental event in Indian test cricket – the passing of the captaincy baton to young Shubman Gill.
Trust Sarthak to grok the significance of the event and put it in the right perspective (with loads of poetic flair):
On June 20, 2025, at Leeds, Shubman Gill will slip his arms into the India Test captain’s navy blue blazer. The thirty-sixth man to wear it. The blazer weighs more than wool and thread should – it carries Pataudi’s audacity, Wadekar’s defiance, Ganguly’s fire and Kohli’s chutzpah. For a nation with cricket coursing through its veins, it’s less garment and more a cardinal robe.
Sarthak relives Gill’s entry into the national scene with the U-19 world cup victory:
While his pals were using their speed and power to pummel bowlers, Shubman was patting and tapping them for fours and sixes. The shot that lives rent-free in my head – as vivid as last night’s basil chicken, and considerably more nourishing – came in the semi-final against Pakistan. A bouncer, the kind that makes honest batters duck and aggressive ones unleash violence. Shubman simply stood tall, let it come. Then, with the nonchalance of someone adjusting a photo frame, he redirected it for four over his shoulder.
He then lays down several oddities in the circumstances leading up to Gill’s captaincy – including being dropped in the previous Australia test series, and having had a run of poor scores in the last 18 months:
Trace your finger through India’s captaincy lineage and you’ll find destiny and natural progressions. Heirs apparent ascending to obvious thrones.
And then there’s Gill. Dropped in Melbourne five months ago. Eighteen Test innings outside Asia since that Brisbane masterpiece and not one score higher than 36. A Test average that belies all his gold-streaked talent.
In terms of small mercies, the pressure on Gill may not be as much as it was on a Kohli or Rohit when they were all-format captains, muses Sarthak:
The label of India’s Test captain places you at the front and centre of its cricket, and, by extension, the centre table of world cricket. Shubman won’t need to dress up for that just yet. Not with Rohit and Virat still prowling the ODI circuit, not with Suryakumar Yadav leading the T20 team. Even in Tests, the superstar and talisman of the team is Jasprit Bumrah. For once, an Indian captain might actually get to learn his trade in relative shadow
Sarthak also captures a heartening moment on the field from the recent IPL:
But, amidst all the chaos, there’s a moment of warmth: after Rohit Sharma gets dropped a second time, Gill walks over to an irate Mohammed Siraj, hand on shoulder, voice low, leading him back to his mark. It’s tender, almost. We’ll need a lot of this in the summer, when England’s Red Bull-high batters kick into gear.
Sarthak ends with a lovely connect between Gill’s batting talent and his role as a captain:
Watch Shubman Gill bat, and you sense that he has an extra half-a-second compared to everyone else. In his new role, which can very quickly become suffocating, Gill will often need to take that half-a-second’s breath, even if just to tell himself that he belongs.
For the sake of Indian cricket, I hope that Gill is able to ease into this new role and shine.
b. ‘Ride & Prejudice’ by Rohan Banerjee
Rohan is one of my favourite writers especially when it comes to observational humour. In this piece, he achieves the rare distinction of being hilarious and thought-provoking at the same time.
He starts with a lovely bit of mystery – why is Simran (his wife) upset…?
“It’s unacceptable. The same thing, every single time.”
The set of her jaw and the edge in her voice made me wonder if I’d been too hasty.
It’s not because Rohan ate the last bite of the tiramisu (naughty!). It’s because the waiter handed over the bill to Rohan despite Simran asking for it.
Rohan builds off this incident to share his thoughts on the embedded patriarchy in society at large. He illustrates it with several examples of the typical dominating-wife-scared-husband tropes that are trotted out everywhere from sangeet ceremonies to popular comedy shows.
I loved this line that Rohan uses to explain how such ‘humour’ is no longer funny:
I do not remember when this brand of humour lost its appeal. At some point, these gags did, indeed, begin to induce gagging.
Rohan then shares an incident of him taking on an auto driver due to his prejudice about women drivers (hence the title). Before getting into that conversation, though, Rohan does a hilarious number on auto drivers who summarily reject passengers:
The most common species of auto-wallahs is the one who responds to your plea with a terse shake of his head and a revolted scrunching of his face, as if the stink of your rotten personality is polluting the entire street. This rejection — not just of your destination, but of your very existence — is swift and ruthless. The reaction may sting, but it is better than what the second category of auto drivers dish out: utter disdain. These individuals do not so much as glance in your direction as they pass by you. You are unworthy of their attention, less than dust beneath their chariot wheels.
Despite these formidable odds, Rohan once manages to get an auto and is inclined to be nice to the driver (especially given his people-pleasing tendencies). But when the driver makes a derogatory remark about women drivers, Rohan is unable to hold it back.
I just loved this para where Rohan describes why he had to react to the driver’s prejudice:
The stereotype of women being bad drivers is something that never fails to rile me up. As a toddler, I accompanied my mother to her driving lessons. By the time I started school, she was the designated driver in our family. In suburban Kolkata of the mid-1990s, she was a novelty. When she dropped me off, my classmates would often comment on her ‘coolness’, while treating me as proof that the trait was not hereditary.
Uff, that last line. PG Wodehouse vibes.
🎧 1 long-form listen of the week
a. ‘Ezra Klein: The Case Against Writing with AI’ on the How I Write podcast with David Perell
In this thought-provoking conversation, David Perell speaks with Ezra Klein, (author, podcaster, ex-co-founder of Vox Media, and currently the co-author of a new book called Abundance which is making waves in the US).
While the duo discuss multiple themes like writing, editing, and journalism, the parts that stayed with me were those about the perils of reading and writing with AI.
Ezra says that when he is submitting his work to an editor, he is not bothered about the grammar and the copy editing. He says he is good enough for that. What he looks for (and which is difficult to find) is taste:
The thing that is hard to measure is taste. The most important thing is taste. Both of writers and with editors, on some technical level, if you have an intuitive sense for what is good and what is not, you can probably upskill to get there.
The biggest problem is not knowing what is good and what is not. And it’s a very hard thing to teach, in part because it’s subtle, it’s textured, it’s different from person to person. It doesn’t need to be the same.
Lovely description of the balance between big picture and detail (30,000 foot to 3 inch!):
Marrying reporting that is extremely granular, more granular than what you normally see in my profession, which (is) opinion journalism. Like if you look at what I’m doing in that book or in the columns that led to some of it, in the notice of funding opportunity for the CHIPS Act or the, you know, how the Tannahan housing development work or what was going on in, you know, Prop H in Los Angeles on affordable housing and how people at the Stake Tax Credit, tax credits.
I’m on the one hand getting extremely granular (and then I try) to make some highly generalized points. And I think that marrying of the 30,000 feet and the three-inch is very effective.
Klein makes a strong case for actual reading (and not using AI to summarise large texts for you):
I used to conceptualize knowledge, the way you see it in the movie, The Matrix, where it’s like, I wanted the port in the back of my mind, that the little needle would go into, and that I had read John Rawls’ Political Liberalism. I thought that what you were doing was like downloading information into your brain. And now I think that what you were doing is spending time grappling with the text, making connections. It will only happen through that process of grappling.
And so the idea that you could speed run that, the idea that it could just be summarized for you… (doesn’t work). Part of what is happening when you spend 7 hours reading a book is you spend 7 hours with your mind on this topic. The idea that o3 can summarize it for you, in addition to all this stuff you just will not have read, is that you didn’t have the engagement. It doesn’t impress itself upon you. It doesn’t change you. What knowledge is supposed to do is change you. And it changes you because you make connections to it.
Writing well involves grappling with a lot of false starts:
At some point, what I started trying to do on the book (Abundance) was taking 5-day chunks, basically go to a cabin for a week, a month. And the rhythm of that often was for 3 or 4 days, I felt like I made no headway, or the headway I made got thrown out.
And I was like, fuck, I’ve wasted a week. And then over the next 2 days, I would get so much done, that I hadn’t wasted the week. But it was very non-linear. That structural work had to happen, that mental work had to happen.
Klein feels that AI would give you a false sense of security that you have the answer, when in fact you may need to rethink everything:
I think it is very dangerous to use ChatGPT in any serious way for writing. Because what ChatGPT will never tell you is that the problem with what you’re doing is that it’s the wrong thing entirely. ChatGPT is always going to give you the answer of how do you tweak, how do you rewrite, how do you do the thing that you think you should be doing. It doesn’t know that you’re just wrong, right? And to what I was saying earlier about good editing, and like this is also true for a writer to themselves, you have to be attuned to that voice in you.
It’s like, not right, not right, not right, not right, not right. You’re not trying to bypass that or get around it or get to where it’s soft. You’re trying to get to the point where like, ah, got it right.
That’s all from this week’s edition.
Photo by Diana Polekhina on Unsplash
