This is (almost) verbatim text from a chemistry unit project I did in Grade 12, and I still think it holds up, so I’m putting it up here. Damn, I was so funny back then. I miss the version of me that was willing to be so cheeky on assignments.

When I first started doing this writeup, I did not expect to still be working on it 6 months later. Finishing this was a long, long overdue task for a while. This is the second write-up I’ve done of a talk I’ve given. The first one I did was for “How to be a Talentless Hack in Public”, which I published in zine form first, before then publishing the text on this blog several months later.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the value of writing recently, especially in regard to how it’s been influenced by the advent of generative AI. In the past few months, I’ve had a lot of conversations in which people claimed that generative AI is just as good at writing as humans now, or better, in many cases. While I agree that AI generation tools are, at this point, better at the mechanics of writing than the average person, I have always found their outputs to be shallow and devoid of interesting surprises.