Strunk and White and ChatGPT // BRXND Dispatch vol 81
Plus, the changing fortunes of prompt engineering, agents with credit cards, and OpenAI’s sky-high revenue projections.
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When I sit down to write this newsletter each week, I keep a small stack of style guides within reach—just in case I have a question about, say, whether to hyphenate a compound modifier or how to punctuate a nonrestrictive clause.
I don’t consult these handbooks as often as I used to—not because my writing is flawless (far from it), but because I now prioritize speed over perfection. A certain degree of informality is expected in newsletters. And of course, these days I rely increasingly on AI tools to handle the basics: fixing punctuation, smoothing out grammar, and maintaining consistency. I’m not the first person to observe that using ChatGPT to tighten up a draft is like having a personal copy-editor and fact-checker on call. It saves me time and often surfaces useful suggestions I might not have considered.
For other writers, especially those with less experience, the impact could be even greater. If the internet made it possible for anyone to share their unfiltered thoughts with a global audience, AI is making it possible to write without a strong command of language—to communicate clearly without ever mastering the mechanics. As a result, a staggering amount of knowledge—previously unarchived, unpublished, and largely inaccessible—is about to become available to the general public for the first time.
The societal implications of this transition are difficult to fully grasp, but for writers, one thing is clear: standing out is about to get even harder. AI is great at generating copy that aligns, by definition, with the average. But if you want to rise above the flood of competent, well-structured, soulless copy, you’ll need to cultivate taste, originality, and a distinct point of view.
That’s exactly why I believe style guides still matter, especially for the softer, harder-to-automate aspects of writing like tone, rhythm, and voice. As in any field, you have to meet AI halfway with your own expertise if you want to see the best results. And beyond reading good prose and practicing often, one of the quickest ways to develop that expertise is by studying style guides.
This is especially true for organizations with multiple contributors that need to ensure consistency across a variety of written content. A shared style guide helps maintain a unified voice and avoids the friction that comes from mismatched assumptions about things like formatting, tone, or terminology. With AI, anyone can, and arguably should, be a contributor.
Because we believe writing is our most powerful tool for clarity and persuasion, we created a style guide for our team—one that spans everything from formatting conventions to foundational principles of strong writing. We think everyone should have access to that kind of resource, regardless of whether their job officially calls for “impeccable verbal and written communication skills,” as LinkedIn so often puts it. If you’re curious, you can check it out on the Alephic blog.
What Caught My Eye This Week
Visa and Mastercard are giving agents credit cards. Both payment companies introduced features this week that will allow AI to shop online on behalf of consumers.
OpenAI is opening up its image generator to developers via API.
The WSJ declares prompt engineering, the hottest job of 2023, dead: "User searches on Indeed for the role surged from two searches per million total searches in the U.S. in January 2023, months after ChatGPT’s debut, to 144 per million in April 2023. They have since flatlined at about 20 to 30 searches per million, according to Indeed.”
Duolingo is the latest company to publicly release an internal memo signaling an “AI-first” strategic shift.
The publisher of Mashable, PCMag, and other websites is joining a wave of media platforms suing OpenAI over copyright infringement. As programmer and blogger Simon Willison recently noted, we’ve probably reached the tipping point where AI-assisted chatbots dramatically outperform traditional search methods for research and news. Pretty soon every publisher will have to decide whether it’s better for their business to resist giving LLMs access to their IP, or go for licensing deals.
Google’s leadership is also wrestling with the role of search in an increasingly AI-driven world. Related: New testimony in an antitrust suit shows Alphabet pays “enormous sum of money” to preinstall Gemini on Samsung phones, but has not yet monetized the platform with ads.
Why AI apps are still in the “horseless carriage” era. “When I use AI to build software I feel like I can create almost anything I can imagine very quickly. AI feels like a power tool. It's a lot of fun. Many AI apps don't feel like that. Their AI features feel tacked-on and useless, even counter-productive.”
OpenAI forecasts revenue will reach $125 billion in 2029.
Palantir is building AI FDEs.
A new study finds AI Overviews reduce clicks by 34.5%, contradicting Google’s already-tenuous claim that the feature actually increases clickthrough rates.
Netflix CEO says AI presents an opportunity not just to make movies 50% cheaper, but “10% better.”
As much as 30% of Microsoft’s code is now written by AI.
Over on the Alephic blog, Noah wrote about institutional inertia, abundance discourse, the paradox of DocuSign, and why success breeds the very bureaucracy that can eventually undermine it: “In the 1980s, economist Mancur Olson delivered a stark warning about what happens as systems grow more complex and stable. Olson observed that societies accumulate "distributional coalitions"–special interests, rules, and organizational layers–that gradually slow progress. In such complex systems, those who excel at navigating the bureaucracy tend to be rewarded, which perversely incentivizes even more complexity. This leads to institutional sclerosis, where decisions become bogged down, groups fixate on protecting their share, and the best talent shifts from innovation to process navigation.”
New Jobs
Communications and Technology Strategy Director at Publicis Groupe, New York City (link)
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Thanks for reading,
Luke