michael-dean-k/

Earlier today I wrote a sentence, “AI should almost never write your sentences,” and yet here I am now writing a very different one: AI-generated essays could help you explore rogue intellectual questions that don't deserve too much time. If there’s no personal angle, no stakes or tie-in to your day-to-day circumstance, it very likely doesn’t deserve deca-hours of careful thought. For every 100 ideas that strike me per month, I can possibly give one of them proper care. Maybe 20-30 of them can get a rush job, like this, earning immortal existence as a jotting on my personal website. But for those 70 ideas that would otherwise die, is it not worth seeing if a machine-made essay can spin up something amusing?

For example—after my call with Lily tonight, I wrote down this question: “when and why did China begin its paradigm of distillation attacks?” We only use that phrase for how they quantize our frontier AI models, but is this not a similar strategy to how they embraced, optimized, and cheapeed global consumer goods in the 1980s and 90s? When did this start? And why? I first heard this idea on a podcast (forget where); Lily was enthusiastic about the framing, and it got us wondering when the origin. Beginning of the 20th century? I don’t know if much has been written on it. I’m not about to find out. Yet, I’d be curious to read an essay if such a thing existed.

"1861. After losing two Opium Wars, the Qing court launched the Self-Strengthening Movement: arsenals, shipyards, translation bureaus, all built around imported Western technique. Zhang Zhidong gave it the slogan that still governs the whole enterprise: Chinese learning as the substance, Western learning for practical use. That is a distillation philosophy in nine characters. Take the method, keep the identity, never become the teacher.

1978. Deng's reform and opening. Guangdong's "three imports, one compensation" processing trade, then the Shenzhen Special Economic Zone in 1980, then joint-venture rules that made technology transfer the price of market access. This is the era your podcast was describing. Foreign firms brought the teacher into the classroom voluntarily.

2006. The one nobody cites, and the most literal. The State Council's fifteen-year science and technology plan made "indigenous innovation" national doctrine and named the mechanism outright: introduce, digest, absorb, re-innovate. The state wrote the paradigm down as policy. DeepSeek is a downstream consequence of a sentence published nineteen years earlier.

As for why: because it works, and because every latecomer has done it. Samuel Slater memorized British mill designs and rebuilt them in Rhode Island in 1789. Hamilton's Report on Manufactures two years later all but recommended it. Meiji Japan did it, then postwar Japan did it again to American electronics. The United States was the China of the nineteenth century. What is distinctively Chinese is not the copying but the Zhang Zhidong stance, the insistence that the technique can be separated from the civilization that produced it.

The interesting question underneath yours is whether that separation is possible with a language model, where the technique and the civilization arrive in the same weights.

Consider that. Isn't it more authentic that I quoted AI at length instead of attempted to edit it, rewrite it in my own voice, and pass it off as my own? The prompt for this is the last paragraph I wrote, so you can imagine how man & machine can fuse together into a Platonic dialogue, two entities circling a question.

An essay is, in the end, is the exploration of a question. Of course there are many little decisions that guide how a piece unfolds; the writer has free will. But a great, solid, specific question has some degree of determinism. The essence emerges from the formulation of the question itself. As tech-broish is this may sound, there is an art to prompting—not in prompting an LLM per se, but in shedding through layers of questions to find the real thing you want to know. This was a core idea I learned from my architectural thesis professor: our whole fall semester was dedicated to discovering the question we wanted to answer in the spring.

And so for those abandoned seedlings that would see no light or water if they were forced through the formality and purity of prose on the page—can we not give them life too? Are we afraid that mere exposure to AI writing will leave us intoxicated by a machine muse, leaving us fat-fingered and lazy to never writing sentences again? I can't see it, at least not personally. I think there’s room for slow-lane 6-month elaborate hand-written constructions, weekly newsletters, daily logs (like this), and then maybe several “AI essays” per day.

This is a big turn for me! I’m suddenly open to this? If I were to commit to the theoretical ideal—of maximally pure prose—and prioritize 50-hour essayistic excursions over all the other things I'm juggling as a new parent, I'd destroy my life for no reason. My curiosity is too vast to explore everything by hand. There are only so many essays one can write in a year, in a life.

So I wonder: Can there be a legitimate and respected “hybrid” format for an AI-human essay? Maybe this form can (a) open with a human introduction—250-500 words to share context, stories, and arrive at a hyper-specific set of questions—(b) include a middle with 1,000 words or so of AI-generated words, carefully baked for an hour through a multi-step harness, and then (c) close with a 250-500 word author's reaction to that essay. There could even be visual way to differentiate the two modes of text. I like this because you’re not passing off AI writing as your own; instead it’s a human-machine symbiosis formatted as a Platonic dialogue; the reader watches an entity authentically processing some constellation of hyper-facts, and the final response can take any tone—wonder, disgust, absurdity—; it need not be machine reverence.