I often agree with John Gruber, but I think he’s lost the plot with this one.

The thing I don’t understand is why he seems to care so damned much about this subject--enough to write over 4,500 words on it!

John writes for a living. That’s his profession. He’s been writing for over 25 years now. When you’re that good at writing, and you care this much about your writing, you don’t allow an LLM to take over your job. I just can’t imagine that he’s in the market for LLMs and that literary excellence is his number one selection criterion.

So why is he so livid about it? It’s like being angry that wine is going to start coming in smaller bottles even though you don’t drink wine.

Even if he’s angry on behalf of other people, I don’t get it either. In my view, having LLMs write publishable content on your behalf is not a socially-acceptable use case, nor a professionally-acceptable one in most professions, even though people are abusing it for this purpose anyway. And besides, the models aren’t even all that good at it today. If you agree with that, then you certainly should not care if it’s using different phrasing than you otherwise might prefer if the meaning is similar enough.

I can't help but wonder if perhaps his hatred of EU technology regulation (which, admittedly, is mostly pretty dumb and is mainly just making life worse for users) is getting the better of him.