Tech founders and CEOs are all rapidly adopting AI, deploying it across their companies and personally using it to handle emails and other busywork.
But Paul Graham, the cofounder of startup accelerator Y Combinator and one of the most venerated names in Silicon Valley, has already grown tired of the tech’s influence. When he receives pitches that are AI written, it’s such a turn off that he now closes them on sight.
“A lot of the emails I get from founders are now written in a hard-hitting journalistic style,” Graham wrote this week. ” I know they’re written by AI, because no founder ever wrote this way before. And once you realize something is written by AI, it’s hard not to ignore it.”
To say his feelings were mixed on this would be an understatement.
“I have never knowingly finished reading an email signed by a human but written by AI,” Graham added. “It feels like being lied to, and who would stand for that?”
This should be a warning sign to tech CEOs, if they’re not too busy getting obsequious advice from a chatbot to notice. Graham, whose word goes far in tech circles, has historically been a major AI booster and investor. Just last month, he proclaimed that AI was the “biggest opportunity for would-be startup founders.” That makes his latest musings distinctly ironic, but all the same, if even someone who’s advocated for AI’s revolutionary power has already turned heel and decided that it reflects negatively on the person using it, it doesn’t bode well for tech’s long-term image.
“It makes me think less of the author. It means they can’t write well unaided (or feel they can’t), and that they’re trying to trick me,” Graham said of AI emails. “It’s not impressive to use AI to write stuff for you; any teenager can do that.”
Some accused Graham of “cognitive dissonance.” In addition to his usual AI boosterism, Graham also recently celebrated how AI was “giving a lot of hard-working founders the growth they deserve.”
Graham saw no contradiction between that sentiment and his latest post.
“You’re supposed to use it,” he said of AI, “but in the right way.”
But what is “the right way”? AIs are large language models. Writing, be it language or code, is exactly what they do. If AI shouldn’t be used to wholesale write emails or essays or pitch decks, how should it be? If the suggestion is that AI should be used more subtly and intelligently, fine, but means that its applications would be niche — and “niche” isn’t what the investors pouring hundreds of billions of dollars in the industry are hoping.
All that is to say that the AI industry is fraught with contradictions, and so far it’s survived because the tech’s being built and deployed fast enough to outpace them. For now, at least. In response to Graham’s post, one observed the irony of how “people who are pro AI don’t want to be on the receiving end of AI work.”
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