It's not This—it's that

As a quick followup to yesterday's post, I wanted to highlight something in Claude's editorial comments when I asked it to turn the email into a post for LinkedIn. In the Claude Skill that I crafted for this purpose, I explicitly forbid Claude to inject any variation of "It's not X—it's Y." If you've read enough AI slop, you know what I'm talking about.

• It's not about speed—it's about impact

• It's not just a feature—it's a transformation

• We don't serve food—we serve experiences

Now, in my own email, written without AI, I used an example of such a two-beat contrast myself:

"Writing exposes vague thinking; prompting an AI does not."

Claude pointed it out, almost like a child calling out parental hypocrisy, as if to say: "I'm not allowed to use it, but it's all good if you do it. Okay, meatbag."

And that highlights why you can't have AI do your writing for you. There's a time and place for any sort of rhetorical device—even the cliched ones, as long as they're used sparingly and with good judgment (which I don't claim all my writing always has; it's a never-ending process of trying to improve).

The way AI approaches rhetorical and stylistic devices reminds me of a hilarious quote by the late film critic Roger Ebert, about the movie Battlefield Earth:

The director, Roger Christian, has learned from better films that directors sometimes tilt their cameras, but he has not learned why.

In a good movie, you don't even notice these devices. In a bad one, they stick out like sore thumbs.