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Templates cap you at average
Why templates limit you
Templates are tempting because they save twenty minutes at night. But no two situations are the same, and a template plasters over the little cracks in reality that only you can see and exploit. Using one gives up the chance to be better than your own work from six months ago, when you were six months dumber.
A second reason is that everything worth doing deserves originality, and the world has a shortage of it. Handing a founder you care about a template insults their originality and insults your own ability to keep generating new ideas.
AI writing at sea level
AI writing works the same way. Relying on it to write and come up with ideas puts you at sea level, at the level of anyone willing to pay a fraction of a cent for a token to get similar output from the same shared brain. For someone far below average, that is an upgrade. For anyone who can be even a little bit better than average, it means robbing yourself.
Emerson on imitation
Imitation is suicide, in Ralph Waldo Emerson's words, because imitating others kills your own ideas. A person is a unique combination of beliefs, ideas, and feelings, and muting those mutes a sacred part of the self.
Where does 'imitation is suicide' come from?
The line comes from Ralph Waldo Emerson's essay Self-Reliance. Emerson urged readers to trust their own thought and to insist on themselves instead of copying others. The essay appeared in his book Essays: First Series, published in 1841.
Why does AI writing sound so alike?
Language models are trained to predict the most likely next word, so their default output gravitates toward common phrasing. Tuning with human feedback pushes it further toward the responses raters prefer, which narrows the range. In a 2023 study, researchers Vishakh Padmakumar and He He found that writers using an instruction-tuned model produced essays that were more similar to one another than essays by writers working alone.
Why does a starting template shape the result?
In a 1974 paper, Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman showed that people adjust too little from a starting number, even when the number is arbitrary. In their experiment, a wheel of fortune was rigged to stop on either 10 or 65 before participants estimated the share of African countries in the United Nations. The median estimate was 25 percent after 10 and 45 percent after 65.
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