Editor's Synopsis
David Perell reflects on how AI is undermining writing's value as proof of work. He points to a long-standing genre of books that functioned essentially as glorified business cards — authored not to be read, but to signal credibility. With AI making it trivially easy to produce polished text, this kind of performative writing loses even its symbolic weight. The post suggests a broader shift in how we evaluate written content in an age of AI-generated text.