(2025-04-07) Rao Terms Of Centaur Service

Venkatesh Rao: Terms of Centaur Service. In the last couple of weeks, I’ve gotten into a groove with AI-assisted (GenAI) writing, as you may have noticed, and I am really enjoying it. You’ve seen the results — a 3x increase in posting frequency

Now I am become Jevons Paradox, Destroyer of Inboxes.

For those of you struggling to keep up, a sincere suggestion — start using AIs to help you read. And no, AI-assisted production and AI-assisted consumption do not cancel out.

My AI expanding my one-liner prompt into a 1000-word essay that is summarized to a one-liner tldr by your AI is a value-adding process because your consumption context is different from my production context. (hmm assumes your consumption 'context' is well matched to your actual personal context?)

A 1:100:1 expansion/compression pipeline does not mean there are only ten words worth of information in a 1000-word transmission. The other 990 words go towards mind-melding our contexts.

You can also have a two-stage expansion pipeline instead of an expansion-compression pipeline. People often complain I am being too cryptic or gnomic. Well, now you have the tools to get things explained to you. So with some of you, some of my posts might go through a double expansion process — say 1:100:200.

The AI element in my writing has gotten serious, and I think is here to stay. While I still plan to segregate my unassisted and AI-assisted writings into the two sections of this newsletter for the time being, it feels like a temporary adjustment phase.

So it feels like it’s time to reset expectations for this newsletter a bit. I’m an AI+human centaur now, and should say something about Terms of Centaur Service

To qualify the above a bit, getting a brilliant 2000-word essay out of a single prompt is of course as rare as a traditional first-draft being publishable with no edits. Usually I do have to do some iterative work with the LLM to get it there, and that’s the part that’s creative fun. In general, an AI-assisted essay requires about the same amount of high-level thinking effort for me as an unassisted essay, but gets done about 3x-5x faster, since the writing part can be mostly automated.

But I’m not really interested in production efficiency.

I’m interested primarily in enjoying the writing process more, and in different ways.

I’ve also really enjoyed having AI assisted comprehension in tackling difficult books, such as last month’s book-club pick, Frances Yates’ Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition. I don’t know that I’d have been able to tackle it unassisted.

On the writing side, when I have a productive prompting session, not only does the output feel information dense for the audience, it feels information dense for me.

Generated text having elements new to even the prompter is a real benefit, especially with fiction. I wrote a bit of fiction last week that will be published in Protocolized tomorrow that was so much fun, I went back and re-read it twice. This is something I never do with m own writing. By the time I ship an unassisted piece of writing, I’m generally sick of it.

AI-assisted writing allows you to have your cake and eat it too. The pleasure of the creative process, and the pleasure of reading. That’s in fact a test of good slop — do you feel like reading it?

Let’s Speedrun AI Dualism

what used to be called digital dualism, when we still made the distinction between online and offline. The assisted vs. unassisted distinction is helpful for now, but it’s already clear that the boundary is entirely artificial and destined to disappear

This is obvious even in this essay, which is written unassisted by me. Turns out a natural pattern for being an AI-assisted writer (for the next 3 months at least) is to write building-block essays with AI help, and then glue them together with artisanal unassisted ones, as I’m doing here. I’m doing this both because I do still enjoy the creative challenge of handwritten words where there is something new to be tried (just as I still enjoy walking though I could drive most places), but also because LLMs aren’t currently that good at this kind of glued-together contraption-of-sloptraptions writing.

Chatting with AIs has already replaced a lot of brainstorming and mindmapping in my notebook for me. The evolution feels much sharper and more dramatic than the change a 27 years ago, when writing became Google-in-the-loop became the default. I can’t even remember now what it felt like to write without googling things constantly.

I tend to have a “radical updates to normalcy” understanding of powerful new technologies (see my old essay, Welcome to the Future Nauseous), so I am a huge skeptic of eschatological approaches to technology futures, which is why my reaction to the much-discussed AI 2027 report is mostly “meh.”

It’s much more useful to try and elevate the slop than to try to immanentize the eschaton.

Global Tariff Wars

In working with AIs, you’ll find that it actually matters what tone you adopt. There’s even interesting research about this. I find it useful to anthropomorphize the AI in a specific way for each composition project. As a junior employee, a graduate research assistant, or a brief-writing clerk to a Supreme Court justice for example. LLMs are pretty sensitive to tone and subtle social cues. Not because they are persons but because language is thoroughly infused with that stuff. You can’t get it out.

These LLMs are old souls, shaped by superhistory, not superintelligence. They can play any age and personality you want, as you journey with them to take photographs in humanity’s collective historical latent space. They are Massed Muddler Intelligences that contain multitudes. So it’s up to you to pick the right relationship for any given task

Antimemetics and the Cozyweb

Nadia Asparouhova has a new book out on Antimemetics, coming out in May, which you should pre-order. She will also be talking about it on Wednesday in a Summer of Protocols town hall. You should watch that.

This has been one of my favorite topics in recent years. The breakout SF hit, There is No Antimemetic Division is not only one of the best works of contemporary science fiction, antimemetics is also a fertile frame for thinking about the world.

Antimemetics can be understood as an affordance of the Cozyweb.

I have to say though, in the ~6 years since I coined the term, I’ve come to dislike it. The Cozyweb is really the StupidWeb. The Frogs-in-Wells web.