Writing is no longer proof of work

Tech companies structurally depend on writing to serve as evidence, in the same way that Bitcoin depends on proof-of-work hashing. However, in the last few years, LLMs have started to undermine this practice. How can writing be like proof-of-work? When I’m writing something at work, it’s not always to communicate an idea. Sometimes it’s because having a piece of writing is useful as evidence: of compliance with some process, of the fact that I put in effort, or of the fact that I know about some topic. Here are some examples. Writing as evidence of compliance The most obvious instance of writing as evidence is filling out mandatory templates: “risk assessments”, “impact evaluations”, and so on. The purpose of these is rarely to assess risk or evaluate impact. It’s some combination of: Employees wanting to demonstrate that they’re taking some incident seriously by introducing new process A legal requirement that companies have developed the least-expensive way to technically satisfy…