The defense against slop and brainrot

Incredible writing by Paul Jun on resisting the inevitable brainrot that we will experience as a result of over reliance on AI. The whole thing is quotable, highlightable.

https://substack.com/home/post/p-168778475

This is what AI is doing to students

Meghan O’Rourke in the New York Times, about how AI is influencing her own writing practice and how she sees it impacting students in her creative writing class.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/18/opinion/ai-chatgpt-school.html/

My highlights:

On discovery and learning in an analog mode:

When I was an undergraduate at Yale in the 1990s, the internet went from niche to mainstream. My Shakespeare seminar leader, a young assistant professor, believed her job was to teach us not just about “The Tempest” but also about how to research and write. One week we spent class in the library, learning to use Netscape. She told us to look up something we were curious about. It was my first time truly going online, aside from checking email via Pine. I searched “Sylvia Plath” — I wanted to be a poet — and found an audio recording of her reading “Daddy.” Listening to it was transformative. That professor’s curiosity galvanized my own. I began to see the internet as a place to read, research and, eventually, write for.

The analog generation:

This, I think, is the urgent question. For now, many of us still approach A.I. as outsiders — nonnative users, shaped by analog habits, capable of seeing the difference between now and then. But the generation growing up with A.I. will learn to think and write in its shadow. For them, the chatbot won’t be a tool to discover — as Netscape was for me — but part of the operating system itself. And that shift, from novelty to norm, is the profound transformation we’re only beginning to grapple with.