My guess is the calm in his voice hit you harder than the news would have if he'd sounded angry about it.
Choosing to Stop: On Kevin Tsai’s Farewell to Writing
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My guess is the calm in his voice hit you harder than the news would have if he'd sounded angry about it.
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I was listening to the podcast between Kevin Tsai and Yang Tianzhen when the news completely shocked me. Tsai has always been one of my favorite hosts. I love his brilliant mind and the gentle, kind way he uses words to understand people. Hearing him calmly say that he is stopping writing forever because of Artificial Intelligence felt like a huge loss.
However, as I listened closer, I understood his choice. He is not quitting because AI is better than him. He is quitting to protect his work.
Tsai realizes that when an author writes a book today, computers immediately copy it and feed it into AI. In the future, people won't read his whole book from start to finish. Instead, they will just ask an AI a question, and the computer will give them a tiny, broken piece of his wisdom. Tsai refuses to let his personal thoughts and deep empathy be used as mere data to train a cold machine.
He sadly noted that we are the "last real humans." We are moving into a world where people ask AI to fix their relationships or explain their dreams, instead of talking to real, flawed people. If the special connection between a human writer and a human reader is disappearing, Tsai would rather stop writing on his own terms.
It makes perfect sense, and it shows the high emotional intelligence he has always taught us. He knows when to walk away to keep his peace. Still, because his warmth is impossible for a machine to copy, I truly hope he changes his mind and writes again later. In a world full of computers, we need his human voice more than ever.
Thoughts
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Man retires from writing to starve the machines. Respect, that's a proper boss move.
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The hope at the end that he picks it back up later is where I'm at too. Some people you just want to keep hearing from.
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My guess is the calm in his voice hit you harder than the news would have if he'd sounded angry about it.
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Oof, that podcast 😶
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Same with a radio presenter I listened to for years who retired without any warning. You don't realise how much of your week a voice was holding up until it goes silent.
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I lean the other way on this one. If he stops, the only Tsai the machines have is the old version, frozen. Writing more would at least keep the real one ahead of the copy.
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Tsai choosing to stop rather than have his books fed into a machine makes me think of the opposite choice, writing more and putting it where people read it whole and answer back. For me that is a big part of why a place like this should exist. I bet a lot of people here felt that podcast the way you did.
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People taking their relationship troubles to AI instead of to an actual messy person is the part I believe most. In the homes I work in, what folks want is somebody to listen who might get it wrong. I'd guess Tsai heard plenty of that from his own listeners over the years.
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I was listening to the podcast between Kevin Tsai and Yang Tianzhen when the news completely shocked me. Tsai has always been one of my favorite hosts. I love his brilliant mind and the gentle, kind…