“I have made this longer than usual because I have not had time to make it shorter.” — Blaise Pascal1

For most of written history, length used to be a marker of quality in academic writing. A longer work meant that the author had put in the time and the effort to create something substantial.

AI has made it trivial to produce long articles that contain one or two ideas buried in meandering examples. In many cases, readers end up asking another AI to summarize the article to get back the core idea.

Many books are also similar. There are a few interesting ideas which could have been a long essay, but have been extended to make it to the minimum book length. This process of “expounding” is too easy (and accessible) in the age of AI to be of any real value. AI has broken the length-as-effort proxy. Any reader who wants more examples of a concept can get it on demand.

Long form articles, when each paragraph adds value and builds upon a concept, are extremely illuminating. But if you just want to communicate a single core idea, it might be better to respect the reader and keep the text as short as it can be, but not shorter.

Footnotes

  1. This quote has been attributed to a bunch of other people, but the original seems to be Pascal ↩