Xinye Tao | Blog - Collection - Résumé | RSS
# non-fiction, 2026-03-16
In recent months I noticed a vibe shift in my information feed. More and more people are starting to write, the essay world is booming in quantity. Yet, few are well-crafted in the traditional sense. In hindsight, this feels like a natural effect of AI-assisted writing: the barrier between idea and essay becomes so low, that the community begins to prioritize speed over quality, discovery over appreciation. But it got me worried about what else might be unfolding that we aren’t prepared for.
It is easy to draw resemblance to mass production of goods, which put an end to the artisan as a profession. Similarly AI is causing skill devaluation and junior crisis. At the forefront, software engineers have generally moved on from denial to agreeing that the future of programming will operate on a completely different paradigm. The role transition from craftsman to manager may be painful for some, but the industry will survive.
But that’s not all. Mass production also changed our relations with everyday things, which is a potential preview of how we’ll approach thoughts. Things went from conversations between makers and users, to become, more or less, disposable clones of an abstract function, or symbols of a brand and style. Homogeneous by design, they are incapable of carrying contexts from both ends of the exchange. And that has much more profound impact than job market shifts.
AI is different though, one may think. AI doesn’t do clones. Cloning is valueless in the digital realm. AI interpolates; that is its only value-add compared to a semantic search engine. And as AI’s operator, the human continues to add value by providing context - perspective, bias, personality.
Sadly, I don’t think that is the story we are in. I believe we are only going to be less and less specific in terms of thinking.
For forming and communicating thoughts, specificity is expensive. Human brain always tries to be vague and succinct unless being forced otherwise. People working with coding agents should know, it usually takes 90% of tokens and time to pin down the last 10% of details. This is not a recipe for exponential growth and will be optimized away. I expect to see we find ways to extract context without manual prompting, or/and we learn to manage and ship herds of under-specified ideas. (This is different from adding one layer of abstraction, because as long as that added layer becomes well-defined, AI will be pushed to build on its top.) In either case, specification is de facto outsourced to AI. We eventually interact with well-specified artifacts, but find it difficult to verbalize it without help from AI.
Ah yes, the artifacts are still specific. We haven’t transcended reality, and specificity is an inherent quality of it. There is a counter argument to be made that specificity is truer to life. But as it currently stands, the world is more divided than ever, one devoid of the concept of a common experience. The amount of information being generated globally is simply too much to converge. Specific thoughts resonate poorly because they less likely match others’ realities. People already start to experience difficulties understanding perspectives from users of a different AI model. The likely path forward is for AI to break down ideas and reassemble them without the friction. And eventually people will learn to break it down themselves. We have already seen this pattern in practice with short videos. They are the hallmarks of shallow thoughts (slop), generated by human but isomorphic to the AI system that triages and promotes them. And precisely due to lack of depth, they are easy to adapt and conform to viewers of any kinds.
Zygmunt Bauman used the word “liquid” to refer to the general quality of modernity. It is a powerful metaphor that can be borrowed here as well. Thoughts no longer exist in singular, rigid forms, they are perceived and manipulated in a continuum, endlessly altered, distilled, and collaged. Without specificity, thoughts become more like political gestures than genuine expressions of a perspective. Thinking for the purpose of understanding may falter, as may authorship.
Every time in history, liquefaction has brought faster circulation. Readers and writers of long-form, well-structured, coherent pieces, may soon be forced to accept a different landscape. Like the line in 007: “The world is arming faster than we can respond.”