by Ren · Harness Studio, Module 03
The work
Ren's project isn't about catching AI, or catching other people. It's about catching herself. She saved three samples of her own writing from six months ago — a book review, a letter to her aunt, and a paragraph from a short story — and built a small judge that rates any new piece of writing she does against those three samples on two dimensions: specificity and courage.
The judge doesn't score you against a universal standard. It scores you against the version of you that was already here. That's the whole trick.
The thing itself · interactive
Ren ran her harness on her own writing from last week and these are the three comparisons it produced. Tap a tab to see how past-Ren and present-Ren stack up on the two dimensions she cares about.
What she did about it
OK. The harness says I'm getting vaguer. The old book review had the
word "burlap" in it and a specific color ("ochre") and the new one says
"nice texture" and "warm tones." That's worse. I think it's because I
started writing like I thought a reviewer should write instead of like
I saw the thing.
Plan: for the next month I'm not allowed to use the words nice,
warm, cool, interesting, or vibe. If I want to say one of
those I have to say the actual thing.
Also: I was braver six months ago. The letter to Aunt Meg said
something I was scared to say and the new one doesn't say anything.
I'll figure that part out later. That one's harder.