Most of us believe org chaos protects our jobs. The reasoning goes: processes are messy, decisions are undocumented, judgment lives in people's heads — so AI can't touch what it can't even see clearly. I used to believe this too. Until I ran a small experiment that made me question it. Turns out, AI didn't need my process. It just needed to see my output.
Shad Linga: How to grasp a text’s intent without asking its author
A scholar at Ramakrishna Math told me about a method used to interpret the Vedas. And it turned out to be the sharpest tool I've found for a much older question: what a text says vs. what its author claims it says.
Translation Gap Between Product and Marketing
In an ideal scenario, product teams hold marketing accountable to technical truth. Marketing holds product teams accountable to the question the customer is actually asking. Neither dismisses the other.
The Great Inversion: How AI Flipped Copyright Inside Out
In 2020, my manager rejected a candidate for plagiarism. In 2024, Anthropic paid $1.5 billion for using pirated books to train Claude, even though a judge ruled the actual training was "fair use."
Welcome to the World Where Everyone is a Writer and Nobody Reads
Writing that actually moves us requires precisely what AI eliminates: the messy human struggle. George Saunders calls this your "iconic space": the place from which you write stories only you could write. I ask my readers: what will you write that only you can write?
Why Retrieval Practice Beats Endless Study
The ability to pull information from memory in a challenging environment > Constant reading, reviewing and preparing tonnes of notes.
The Writing Looks ChatGPTish
When people say they can spot AI writing from a mile, what do they actually mean? Excessive em dashes? Short paragraphs? Words like "delve" and "meticulous"? LinkedIn was full of cringe long before ChatGPT. AI didn't invent buzzwords or performative prose. The algorithm simply picked what went viral. We're pretending that before ChatGPT, all writing flowed from pure creativity. As if "On Writing Well" and "The Elements of Style" never existed. We always followed rules. But our inability to follow them perfectly made our writing unique. AI follows rules perfectly. That's the problem. I explore this paradox in this essay.
Forget AI Imitating Us, We Are Imitating AI
Ever feel like LinkedIn posts sound... a bit too perfect these days? Or like certain words are suddenly everywhere? You're not imagining it. I dive into a fascinating and unsettling trend: we might be starting to sound like AI, not the other way around. Drawing on insights from the Max Planck Institute and literary critics, I explore how platforms and AI tools are subtly reshaping our language, making it more uniform and less uniquely human. It's not just about what we write, but how it impacts trust and authenticity in communication.
The Unwritten Self: A Writer’s Identity Crisis in the AI Era
if AI can write, what does a writer become? Our roles have changed from creators to curators overnight. But what if this disruption forces us to redefine our worth, to build identity beyond skills, on foundations AI can't touch?
Has GenAI killed the college essay?
I explore if GenAI has killed the college essay. Why are students required to write essays? It’s to assess their ability to think through things, and communicate their perspective in a clear, compelling and organized fashion. I argue that GenAI, by removing the creative struggle from the writing, is capable of deeply affecting how we think.
Musings by Madhav 