I actually think you can unite view 1 and 2! You can make your writing more skillful and more voicey at the same time.

My latest rabbit hole has been building an AI editor that I believe is as good as my best human editors — the distinguishing factor being that I’ve taught it to make my writing better by teaching Claude what it means to make an essay more jasminey rather than more “generic AI good.”

I give it a bunch of my past work, notes what I hope to accomplish, and tell it about the writers I admire and why. We then write a custom rubric based on those qualities. So if you think of that Ira Glass quote about the taste gap, it brings my craft up to meet the standard of my taste.

As an example, here’s some of the feedback it gave me on a draft of my last post on AI populism — I gave Claude 3-4 versions of the ending that it told me were shit before it was finally satisfied. (It’s also not at all sycophantic, and I never let Claude write for me, only give me feedback.)