I’ve never felt more inclined to use this term in my life than now. Weird is what we’re living through — or at least, how I’m perceiving what we’re living through.
There was a time when I would consult a dictionary for a word definition. First it was the physical book, then it was the one that came with my operating system, and then the online version. In each case, it might have been the Oxford English Dictionary, just with different formats.
Now, I type something into my browser, and an AI-driven response appears, culled from many sites (some dictionaries), and many others as part of a large language model that has scraped the Internet for ‘knowledge’ of what terms mean. With that, let me share the AI-supported definition of weird, with highlights included from the response:
The word “weird” refers to something highly unusual, strange, or bizarre. It is frequently used to describe phenomena, situations, or people that fall outside the bounds of the expected or normal
Things are most certainly weird.
Normalcy, Writing and Thinking
Weird is an amazing word; it can be a term of affection, derision, and confusion. I’ve often used it as the first of these. I work with creativity and innovation, and often weird is the way through bottlenecks toward solutions. Weird is often what inspires people, because it challenges conventional assumptions and norms, which involves creative thinking and framing.
Weird is the pathway to innovation, a vehicle for art and design, and a framing for self-expression.
This is not the weird that I’m experiencing right now. Let’s look at three cases of writing — the blog, book publishing, and essays.
Seth Godin, a long-time published author, prolific blogger, and advocate for bringing art to the world — in every sense of that word, including as it fits with business — recently posted on what he’s seeing with publishing through independent blogs. He writes:
The decline of blog traffic over the last decade is a verified reality, not an imagination:
The Death of RSS (2013): Shutting down Reader forced millions of users away from curated chronological feeds and pushed them into algorithmic social media timelines and centralized search ecosystems.
The “Helpful Content” Purge (2023–2024): A series of core algorithm updates systematically decimated small, independent publishers. Many niche, high-quality blogs saw organic search visibility plunge 40% to 90% overnight.
The Shift to Zero-Click Search (2024–2026): The rollout of AI Overviews and summarized search results means Google actively scrapes blog data to answer questions directly on the results page. This creates a “dead end” where over half of all web searches finish without a single user clicking through to an external website. Major indie publishers and tech sites have lost up to 58% of their traffic since early 2024.
Last week, Tim Ferriss — another prolific writer and content producer — posted an article titled “Has AI already killed how-to non-fiction?“. In analyzing his own sales data, Ferriss illustrates a stark correlation between AI availability and the sales of his books. He asserts (bold in original):
My position—and I’d genuinely love to be wrong—is yes, prescriptive nonfiction is the canary in the coal mine, and the coal mine is enormous. I believe LLMs become the interface to everything: search and purchasing, obviously, but also surfing video, summarizing podcasts, navigating courses, even browsing books. The original content doesn’t exactly disappear; it just becomes raw material that most people never touch directly.
A few weeks ago, Rebecca Winthrop, director of the Center for Universal Education at the Brookings Institution, published an op-ed in the New York Times looking at research she and others have done on the effect of AI and creativity by looking at student essays. She notes that the research shows that AI-driven essays produce less creative and distinctive ideas than those written by humans, even if the language used through AI is correct and even more illustrative than human writing. Looking at the research, she found that “human-written essays offered up to eight times more new ideas than those produced by A.I.“.
She notes:
For the first time in human history, we have a technology that can generate words separately from the thoughts they represent.
What ties these three writers together is that there is concern over the trends away from independent, human-derived authorship. What concerns me is that this also means a trend away from human-powered thinking and creativity.
Weird in Production
These are three examples of how AI is influencing writing in real time. Film production, photography, LinkedIn posts and job applications, academic publishing, music, journalism and pretty much any domain that involves digital creation is being upended by AI.
It feels weird.
For the record, I do not nor have used AI to write this blog. I have used it for some occasional light editing, some image generation for when there was nothing comparable available, also for some SEO support on the metadata (which I’ve never been good at), but the text, formatting, ideas and writing are always human-made. This is not because of some moral position on AI, rather it is about three things 1) trust, 2) thinking, and 3) enjoyment. That is, I want you to trust me, so know that this is my voice coming through the page. Writing allows me to think through the act of putting words to the page. I also enjoy it.
Authorship is about putting your voice to the thoughts in your head. This can be done through visual art, music, podcasting, spoken word, movement (e.g., dance), craft/making, and through many forms of writing. I choose writing (maybe because I’m not a great singer).
Prompt engineering is real, and designing an AI-oriented inquiry does require skill and thinking. But it’s not generating thought through production. The act of creating is as much about the creation process as it is the product.
We become someone because we create things.
That creation is an act of authorship that involves many small judgements about craft, positioning, materials, media, and purpose. All of these are either ignored or marginalized when something else is doing the creating on our behalf.
Maybe we won’t be having these discussions in the years to come. I’m not sure. Creation as a means to maintaining our humanity seems to be more important than ever. Once materials were more diverse and readily available, we had the luxury of taking creating things for granted. Craft was something that was valued and give those makers who demonstrated it a competitive advantage. Automation is taking that away, but only if we let it.
Thank you for reading. And to those creating things from their minds, with their hearts, and putting things into the world that came from and through your hands and head, thank you for that, too.
Weirdness comes from expressing the uniqueness and the commonality within us. I worry we’re losing that among the massification made possible by automation.
I’d rather we kept being weird.
