Mike Maney

Tag: Writing

  • The Inch Leonardo Never Had

    The Inch Leonardo Never Had

    Not every idea deserves to live. But plenty of good ones die before they get a chance. They vanish under the weight of calendars, inboxes, and interruptions — the thousand small frictions that erase a thought before it has time to become something real.

    Leonardo da Vinci lived this problem as fully as anyone we remember. His notebooks are filled with flashes of brilliance that never moved an inch toward becoming real. They reveal a mind where ideas arrived faster than execution, and a compulsion to record them, even when they might never be completed. They stayed ink on paper. Imagine if he’d had something to carry those sparks just a little further.

    Today, we do.

    AI gives us the inch Leonardo never had: not just a way to keep an idea alive, but a way to work it before it’s fully formed. A sentence can be pushed, expanded, challenged. A paragraph can be reshaped or broken apart. A rough draft becomes something you can interrogate. All of it quickly enough to learn whether there’s anything there worth shaping at all.

    But that inch isn’t enough.

    Ideas still need something only humans provide: judgment.

    I learned this early in my career working with Mike Zisman and Larry Prusak on IBM’s knowledge management business (well, they worked on it; I helped them communicate it). Much of that work, as I remember it, centered on the difference and interplay between explicit and implicit knowledge. What you can write down versus what you simply know. Facts versus instinct.

    AI is extraordinary at the explicit. It can generate variations, surface patterns, and produce options at scale. But it can’t do the tacit work. It can’t feel the off-note in a promising idea or sense when something ordinary is pointing to something deeper. It can generate possibilities, but it can’t tell the signal from the static or decide which ones matter.

    AI raises the premium on expertise. When ideas become cheap and abundant, discernment becomes scarce. The advantage shifts to people who can interpret what AI produces with context. They implicitly know when to push an idea further, when to reshape it, and when to let it go.

    That shift changes what expertise actually looks like. It’s no longer defined by how many ideas you can generate, but by how well you can tell which ones hold up under pressure. When beginnings are cheap, judgment is knowing which ones are worth the effort.

    This is the consequence of getting the inch Leonardo never had. AI widens the funnel of possibility, but it doesn’t make sense of what flows through it. It accelerates ideas without considering what happens when they meet reality.

    That responsibility now belongs to us.

    AI can extend a thought, multiply it, and push it forward faster than ever before. But it can’t decide what matters. That decision is what turns an inch into something real.

  • The Future Belongs to Clear Thinkers, Not Fast Writers

    The Future Belongs to Clear Thinkers, Not Fast Writers

    I’ve long argued that clear writing is the surest sign of clear thinking. Putting words to paper or screen forces choices, imposes structure, and strips away clutter. Writing creates clarity.

    AI hasn’t changed that. It has simply added the illusion that anyone can be the next Stephen King. But there’s only one Stephen King. Two, if you count Richard Bachman. Okay, three if you count that Joe Hill fella. But the idea that a prompt can turn anyone into a seasoned writer is a load of crap.

    When AI-assisted writing works, it works because the thinking behind it was clear in the first place (something Oxide’s Bryan Cantrill echoes in this public RFD). Someone came to the tool with context, intent, and a point of view. The AI helped with execution. The hard brainwork was already in motion. When the thinking isn’t there, AI fails fast. It spits out surface-level sludge that puts pretty nouns and verbs neatly together and unravels the second you break the surface and ask it to mean something. The author didn’t outsource writing; they outsourced thinking. And that’s, how shall I say it…bad.

    Clear writing still reveals clear thinking. AI doesn’t change that; it just makes it obvious who’s actually thinking before they hit the prompt.

    The Domain of Experience

    Ironically, AI has become the domain of the “olds”.

    Veterans who know what good thinking looks like, who bring years of pattern recognition and judgment, and can use AI to sharpen their output. They have the experience to spot logical gaps, recognize weak arguments, and know when something sounds good to their ears but feels wrong in their gut.

    Getting great content out of AIs is difficult. It takes a lot of work and rework. Just imagine walking up to a smart person on the street and saying “make me an adventure” and expecting it to be anywhere near good. In the hands of experts, though, I think you could get great content. And, you could probably get more content. — Cote, The AI Apprentice’s Adventures

    Newer writers often stop at the first prompt because the output looks clean and convincing. The challenge is that polish isn’t the same as insight or depth. Without the judgment that comes from wrestling with ideas and words over time, it’s harder to see when the model is basically just winging it.

    This reality is the defining rule of the AI age. Computing has always relied on its shorthand maxims, starting with the 1960s classic: Garbage in, garbage out. AI has simply added its own corollary: Wisdom in, resonance out.

    AI doesn’t invent wisdom; it mirrors the quality of the mind engaging with it. Thin prompts yield thin answers. But when you bring experience, nuance, and constraint, the system reflects that back with greater fidelity. In the end, the limiting factor isn’t the model. It’s the judgment of the person using it.

    AI as Sparring Partner

    The real promise of AI is not as a replacement for thinking, but as its most rigorous catalyst yet. Used well, it forces you to test your thinking instead of skating past it. You have to question what it gives you, push on the weak spots, and decide what actually holds. The tool widens your field of view, but the judgment is still yours.

    Use it as a sparring partner and the ideas get sharper. Most people don’t push that far, and that’s where the trouble starts.

    Those who get the most out of AI aren’t offloading the thinking. They’re pushing it further. The risk is the urge to take the shortcut.

    Garbage thinking still produces garbage writing. AI just hides it better.

  • The Magic of the Room

    The Magic of the Room

    I have an embarrassingly large television screen hanging on my living room wall. 85” of LED goodness. Almost went for the 100” version, but the Costco deals were only so good. Tacked some Govee LEDs to the back that magically reflect colors from the scenes on the screen to the wall and really give it that movie-theater effect. It’s orders of magnitude better than the best theater I went to growing up (which, if you grew up in small-town northwestern New Jersey, you know was The Strand).

    The Strand is, sadly, no more. And even that oversized home setup can’t match the experience I had watching the Jaws / Saturday Night Fever double feature in that $1-a-ticket, red velvet-on-the-walls theater.

    There’s something special about seeing a flick in a theater, as this Guardian story points out (thanks to James for the link). The experience of watching a film on the big — bigger — screen, the smell of popcorn, the trailers, the collective energy of the audience…it’s something that simply cannot be replicated at home. It’s a communal experience that allows us to escape reality for a couple of hours, drawing us into different worlds and stories that linger long after the credits roll.

    My wife and I have a monthly subscription to Regal’s all-you-can-watch movie pass. Earlier this week, while she hosted friends writing postcards to get out the vote, I slipped out to catch a late showing of Stephen King’s The Long Walk.

    I got there a little early. The theater was empty. I grabbed a seat smack dab in the middle. As the pre-rolls started, I expected others to wander in. Then the trailers rolled and…nobody. I had the theater to myself — just me, a tub of popcorn, and a King classic on the screen. It was like my living room, except it wasn’t. It still felt different from sitting on a couch, even if the seat reclined far enough to nearly put me flat.

    Somewhere between the last trailer and the first line of dialogue, I realized how rare it is to give one thing your full attention anymore. No phone. No second screen. Just story. That kind of presence is what makes movie theaters special. And it’s the same muscle that good storytelling in any form depends on.

    My career has been built on storytelling. Immersing myself in stories — in books, on screens, in lyrics — has taught me how to tell better ones. You start to see how structure works, how characters build over time, how rhythm and silence carry meaning. You hear real dialogue and learn how much can be said without saying anything at all. That’s the craft.

    My neighborhood poker buddies once asked how I seemed to know so much about so many random things. I told them it’s my job to make connections. You never know when something Taylor Swift does will tie back to a new computing operating system. Maybe it won’t. Maybe it will. Either way, that’s how the dots get made. And I also reminded them not to ask me the second, deeper questions about any of those topics.

    It’s why I implore PR rookies, and even my peers, to ignore the business books. Fill their nightstands and Kindles with works of fiction. Go to the trashy late-night movie. Spend the rainy Sunday morning watching a black-and-white Turner Classic. Because getting good at this work isn’t about mastering the message, it’s about learning to see, listen, and connect.

    I could’ve waited to see The Long Walk when it hit one of the streaming services. It would’ve been fine. But the magic of the theater is that it puts you somewhere else — a different place, a different mindset. The same goes for the stories we tell in our day jobs. Not to remind people they’re working, but to give them a story they can actually feel — something that lets them experience what we’re trying to communicate.

  • A Small Use of AI That Makes a Big Difference

    On opening night of Monktoberfest, I caught a quick photo of the four authors of the new Progressive Delivery book on a boat in Casco Bay – Heidi Waterhouse, Kim Harrison, Adam Zimman, and James Governor. I added it to a thread Heidi posted to Bluesky about the book launch.

    I got ya.

    — TheSpinMD (@mikemaney.bsky.social) 2025-10-04T23:43:14.128Z

    I would have written alt text for that photo. I’m in the habit for the most part and do my best to think about others. But for a quick reply post? The mental overhead often adds more friction than the value of the reply, slowing me down enough that I will sometimes consider skipping it. With AI, it took seconds.

    When I post photos to Bluesky, I use a custom prompt/GPT to write the alt text. It describes what’s in the image, how it feels, and what someone who can’t see it might want to know. It’s a really basic prompt and I’m sure there are a bunch more like it out there. Here it is for reference:

    Create alt text for images posted to this chat. Review the image and provide descriptive text that helps a user with no or limited sight understand and experience the visual image. The description must fit in 2,000 characters.

    This sounds trivial until you realize how rarely it happens. Most images posted online have no alt text at all. Not because people don’t care about accessibility, but because describing an image takes mental energy that’s already been spent capturing and posting it. The moment has passed.

    For me, AI removes that friction. I upload an image, the system drafts a description, I tweak it if necessary. It’s a quick trip from finder to AI to post. Suddenly accessibility becomes the default.

    When I was more active than I am today on Mastodon’s Hachyderm instance, this was built right into the image upload. One click. The AI-assisted descriptions made that norm easy to follow.

    Now personal prompts and custom GPTs make this available anywhere. Don’t get me wrong: AI can’t replace the human eye and brain. It sometimes misses nuance, gets details wrong, can’t read tone the way you intended (or numbers and letters; but I digress). But it gives you a starting point.

    Here’s what changes: when you add alt text consistently, you start noticing when others don’t. You see how many images float through your feed inaccessible to screen readers, meaningless to anyone who can’t see them. You realize how much gets shared with the assumption that everyone experiences it the same way.

    This is what good technology does. It removes the small obstacles that keep good intentions from becoming consistent practice.

    That’s worth automating.

  • If you write, William Zinsser’s book is your bible

    Writing is a big part of what I do as a PR professional. I read William Zinsser’s “On Writing Well” in college and re-read it every year to keep my writing as sharp and tight as possible. If you write you owe it to yourself to pick up this book.

  • I got into MIT (Technology Review, that is)

    OK, so maybe my SATs and choice of communications as a major hindered my shot at getting into MIT. What they didn’t hinder was my luck in getting a letter printed in MIT Technology Review. The letter is based on a story I read in the publication on my way home from SXSW last month (as well as a tweet from the magazine’s editor, Jason Pontin):

    Technology Review: Letters From Our Readers:  “Out Of This World”
    I read the January/February 2009 issue on my flight home from South by Southwest (the magazine was part of the conference’s swag bag). There wasn’t a weak story on any page, but one was out of this world: Adam Fisher’s oral history of space tourism (‘Very Stunning, Very Space, and Very Cool’).

    While I’ll probably never have the millions to afford a flight to the International Space Station, I can rest easy knowing that my $300 three-hour flight in a cramped coach seat was more comfortable than the accommodations afforded professional space travelers. I only wish I had the window seat they had.

    Mike Maney
    Doylestown, PA

    I may never make it as a subject of one of the magazine’s articles, but it’s still pretty cool to be a part of one of the smartest crowds in technology, if only for a fleeting two paragraphs.

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