What's this about?
Mollick: "It might soon be disrespectful to use a weaker model for human-facing content: 'you saved 6 cents to make me read through error-filled and badly written AI slop? At least send me high quality and low-error slop that doesn't waste my time.'" He adds that this is how he feels about AI comments on X.
What is the norm being proposed?
That model choice becomes an etiquette question rather than an engineering one. The logic: generated text is now unavoidable, so the meaningful signal is no longer whether you used AI but how much you spent on the recipient's behalf. Sending someone cheap output says you valued six cents above their reading time. It is the same social logic as a hastily written email — the content might be identical, but the effort is legible and is itself a message.
Why is it worth noticing?
- It quietly concedes the ground: the argument has moved from "don't send generated text" to "send good generated text".
- The parenthetical about X comments is the concrete case, and it is where most people have actually experienced this.
- Sits opposite the small-models argument from earlier in the week — cheap models are good enough for work, and this says human-facing output is the exception.