What Abigail Adams Showed Me About Shallow Thoughts in the Age of AI

The publication In Pursuit is doing a fantastic series on all of the presidents and the women behind them for America’s 250th anniversary, and I’ve finally been able to catch up on them.

The article about Abigail Adams by Joseph J. Ellis taught me a lot about her, but it’s something in the opening paragraph that struck me the hardest (emphasis mine):

There were no cellphones, no internet, no instant forms of communication. There were, however, letters, which often took weeks or months to arrive. The act of writing a letter was therefore a more deliberative process than composing an email, more like writing a speech than having a chat, more a projection of your deepest thoughts than your immediate impulses.

Abigail and John Adams both bought journals in which to write and keep their letters to each other. They knew given John’s position that those letters might be of some interest.

I’ve been thinking about this sort of idea a lot during my Year of Digital Detox — but really just the instant, constant connection. Not the deliberate part.

Ellis is obviously correct: since 1776, communication and writing have gotten far less deliberate. And it’s negatively impacting our ability to think.

AI is Making This Worse

Where loads of thought would go into letters, today, with AI, more words are being written with the least amount of thought possible. I’ve adopted the saying, "writing is thinking," and this is just another argument for it.

More people are talking about how they’ve trained Claude to sound "just like them"¹, and how they can just fire off an idea and the "agent" can just write an article and publish it for them.

There are also websites like Outrank that basically remove you from the process completely. You tell it some keywords, and it will write and publish articles for you so you can be found online.

The people who use this are putting their name on something they’ve literally put no thought into. It’s like saying you should get credit for The Odyssey because you had the idea to make it into a movie.

That’s not really even my point though. My point is that, while slop is a side-effect of the "AI writes for me" revolution, the real danger is we’re no longer thinking about problems. We’re putting effort into getting noticed for solutions we haven’t considered further than just a prompt.

The good news is that while more people are doing this, it will be easier for you to stand out.

How to Stand Out

The Yankees² just called up George Lombard Jr., a 21-year-old kid, to be our starting shortstop. And so far, the fanbase has been quite taken by him.

Yes, he definitely has the skills. In 11 games, he’s demonstrated baseball IQ that seems increasingly rare in the sport. But he’s only 11 games in. So why is he standing out so much?

Because compared to the parade of errors and issues we’ve seen from our shortstops for several years now, he looks like an absolute veteran player.

I think the same is true of writing; when most of the writing is shoddy, shallow thoughts fired off quickly (or prompted), the good writing will stand out.

To me, thoughtfulness will be a true differentiator in the coming years. With the world’s information at our fingertips, and any answer + explanation readily available, the smartest will not be the people with the most information, but the most thoughtful.

It’s incredible that we have so much more power than any other time in human history, and the majority of users pursue it to think less, not more. To say more without really saying anything.

After all, to quote Qui-Gon Jinn, "The ability to speak does not make you intelligent."³

We need to be more like Abigail and John Adams. Think deeply about a topic and write it down. Don’t outsource your thoughts to a machine.

AI writing is already starting to get old; imagine how it’s going to look in 250 years.