#BR40
We’re in discovery on two information-dense projects, and it feels like drinking from a fire hydrant. Now that AI makes information effortless to produce, that’s how most of us feel, most of the time.
Kirby Ferguson has a theory about creativity. In his film series Everything is a Remix, he argues that nothing is truly new. We copy, we transform, we combine. In 2023, he added a final chapter on AI, the biggest remix machine ever built. Everything it gives you is the past, rearranged.
Which is why the faster we hurtle into the future, the more the past matters. AI can only remix what it's been fed. Telling the good stuff from the slop takes taste and discernment, and those are built from the best of what came before.
I went through a terrible Raymond Chandler phase. I got obsessed with two of his novels (The Big Sleep and The Long Goodbye) and made paintings for years about noir detective fiction.
One of my Chandler-inspired paintings from my noir years (watercolour and ink, 2020)
I’ve been thinking about him recently, and that’s because Chandler had something to tell us about how we write and read in the age of AI.
This is my remix for today.
Chandler learnt his craft by remixing too. He took apart a pulp story by Erle Stanley Gardner, one of the most prolific writers of his day, and rewrote it until he understood how it worked. Then he went in the opposite direction. We’ll come back to Chandler shortly.
It's called a "brief" for a reason
Lately, the briefs landing in my inbox have been getting longer. The latest ran to eight pages.
Eight pages used to mean something. It meant someone had spent days on it, and writing that much by hand usually meant some hard thinking on paper. Joan Didion said she wrote, "entirely to find out what I'm thinking".
That’s one reason I’m writing these words to you early on a Sunday morning.
The brief was full of tactical advice. Which channels to use, how often to post, which ads to run. Much of it was wrong for the business. None of it answered the question I needed answered (and is normally the true point of a brief): what problem are we actually solving?
So I did what I suspect plenty of you are doing. I put it into Claude and asked for a summary.
Talk is cheap
AI has collapsed the distance between labour and output. Eight pages used to take a week. Now they take about forty seconds. Length and effort have come apart.
The cost didn't disappear, though. It moved from the writer to the reader.
Kate Niederhoffer and her colleagues at BetterUp Labs and Stanford have a name for this: workslop. It's AI-made work that looks polished but doesn't move anything forward. In their survey of just over 1,000 US office workers, 40% said they'd received some in the past month. Each piece took almost two hours to deal with.
Then the bit that should worry any business leader. About half of those people now rated the sender as less capable and less reliable.
AI made writing almost free. Reading still costs what it always did.
Your proposals, your pitch decks, your website and your sales emails are all read by someone deciding whether you're worth the trouble. Volume used to signal effort. Now it mostly signals that you have a chatbot and you're not taking responsibility for what it produces.
It says to the reader: I can't be bothered checking this. I'll leave that to you.
Paperback writer
Light through the blinds: another from my noir years
Chandler started out in the pulp magazines in 1933. Pulp paid by the word, so the incentive was to write fast and write long. Gardner could knock out a story in three or four days, and wrote around a thousand of them.
Chandler's first story was an 18,000-word novelette. It took him five months, and he sold it for $180. That's a cent a word.
He drafted on yellow paper cut in half. The story goes that anything not good enough in that tiny space went back through the typewriter. That tight page is where noir's tautness comes from. Read The Long Goodbye (my favourite of his), and it's remarkable how much he packs into a handful of words.
I was as hollow and empty as the spaces between stars.
(Chandler's man Marlowe could really do melancholy.)
A lot of AI writing is hollow and empty too.
Another from the noir years (ink, 2020)
Sign your name to it
Descript's CEO, Laura Burkhauser, put the modern version to me on our podcast, Slideshow with Dave Hayward, back in March. She sees writing as two acts. First, you figure out what you think. Then you put it into words. Getting AI to help with the second can be "slightly tacky", she says. Handing over the first, and claiming it as your own, is "a severe lack of judgement".
Discernment is your edge
Kerry Milne has a key differentiator for people today: discernment. In a LinkedIn post this week, she argued it's about to become an edge. It's knowing which information matters, where the assumptions are weak, where the risk sits, and "when a technically sound answer is commercially wrong".
Her warning for businesses swapping senior judgement for cheaper headcount plus AI is the remix problem in one line: "You also risk getting the same answer as everyone else."
I replied with a story from a few nights ago, when I prompted myself and the AI in circles all evening. I went to bed, started again from scratch by hand the next morning, and nailed it.
Discernment is hardest when you're tired, and AI can wear you out cognitively faster than you'd think.
Let’s take action: a call for radical ownership
It’s time for the world's knowledge workers to rise up and take radical ownership of their content.
I’m not suggesting we abandon AI. But if you send the email, you own its creation, curation, and vision.
To do that, we need to build three muscles for communicating in the AI age.
Sign your name to it: it’s time for radical ownership of your content. What’s in it. What’s not. How long it is. What is the strategic intent? That is all yours.
Discernment, creativity, and taste are your differentiator: if you prompt long enough, AI brings you into the middle. It’s a pattern-matching, same-same-making machine. This is no different from any other era: in the end, discernment, creativity, and taste are what make you stand out.
Managing cognitive load to think and write clearly: AI is a synthetic machine. We’re a biological one. Every time you ingest an 8-page brief, your ability to make complicated decisions that day is diminished a little. Managing your cognitive load and giving yourself the space to write your thinking down is the whole game.
Are you with me? If you are (or even if you’re not), let me know by hitting reply. I have a 100% record of reading and replying to every message I get from Bright Objects readers (even if my accountant is still chasing me for my H1 tax return). I take radical ownership of every message. Look forward to reading yours.
Last words to Chandler:
The French have a phrase for it. The bastards have a phrase for everything, and they are always right. To say goodbye is to die a little.
Goodbye for now,
Dave
