New episode is up. I sat down with Fifa Tran, who runs FeiModern, and we ended up talking for almost an hour about writing, mostly because of something that happened to her a few weeks ago.
She read a Substack piece front to back. Liked it. Thought about it after. Then out of curiosity clicked the AI checker on it. Fully AI written. The whole thing.
And her reaction to that is basically the whole episode.
We got into a lot from there. Why she left Instagram for LinkedIn. The word she’s noticed creeping into everyone’s writing lately, the one that’s replacing the em dash as the tell that something was AI assisted (you’ll know it when you hear it, and once you hear it you can’t unhear it). Why she still journals on paper even though she uses AI every day. A study where people rated AI written stories higher than human ones, until they found out which was which, then flipped completely.
There’s also a bit where I bring up Socrates, who apparently hated writing and thought it would ruin how people remembered things. Which is basically the exact argument people are making about AI right now, just a couple thousand years earlier.
Fifa also mentioned something on Threads that stuck with me. She said writing isn’t just for the finished post. It’s one of the only things left that makes you slow down enough to actually know what you think. I keep coming back to that one.
If you’ve been thinking about your own writing at all lately, this one’s worth the listen.
Find Fifa on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/fifatran/
If you want a nudge to actually start writing instead of just thinking about it, I run a free 5 day challenge:
