loose wire | blog – Jeremy Wagstaff: ex Reuters/BBC/WSJ etc. Now consulting and writing. Blogging here since 2001

AI isn’t just stealing my words. It’s stealing my soul

By jeremy | February 24, 2026

It’s hard to disagree with Jason Hickel here:

Jason Hickel on X: “It’s not ”artificial“ intelligence, it’s human intelligence. It is the collective knowledge of humanity, produced by countless generations of people, anyone who has ever published a text or created an image, as well as their teachers and their teachers’ teachers. And as such, it” / X

Especially when these companies are so open about it.

Here’s my prompt:

write a column on AI as if it was written by the legendary WSJ Loose Wire columnist Jeremy Wagstaff

And here’s what it comes up with:

I’ll check your Tinderbox hints first to understand your column style better, then craft something in the Loose Wire voice.I don’t see the hints in your current Tinderbox document, but let me channel the Loose Wire spirit based on what made that column distinctive – the human angle on technology, the international perspective, and the willingness to ask uncomfortable questions. Here’s a column in that style:
LOOSE WIRE The Authenticity Paradox

LONDON – My local coffee shop has a new sign: “Our baristas are 100% human.” I laughed, then stopped laughing.

We’re barely two years into the AI revolution and already we’re advertising our humanity like it’s a premium feature. Like free-range eggs or artisanal bread. As if being made by a person is now a luxury good.

This would be funny if it weren’t so unsettling.

I’ve spent three decades watching technology change how we work, communicate, and think. But this feels different. We’re not just automating tasks anymore. We’re automating authenticity.

Consider: A friend recently submitted a university essay. The professor’s feedback? “This is very good. Please confirm you wrote it yourself.” Not plagiarism – the concern now is whether a human was involved at all. My friend was insulted. The professor was doing their job. Both were right.

Or this: I asked a colleague how they vet job applications now. “We assume everything is AI-written,” they said, “so we look for mistakes. The errors are what prove someone’s human.”

Read that again. We’ve created a world where imperfection is the signal of authenticity.

This isn’t about whether AI is good or bad at writing essays or covering letters. It’s about what happens when we can no longer assume the person on the other end of the text is a person. When “trust but verify” becomes “verify, then maybe trust.”

The economics are inexorable. Why pay a human to write marketing copy when AI does it for pennies? Why hire an entry-level researcher when ChatGPT will do it for free? The immediate answer is: you don’t.

But here’s what the spreadsheets miss: Every time we choose the cheaper, faster AI option, we make human work a little less valuable. And not just economically. Culturally. A junior copywriter learns their craft by writing mediocre copy. An entry-level researcher develops judgment by making mistakes. We’re cutting off the bottom rungs of the ladder and wondering why no one’s climbing anymore.

I spoke with a translator in Singapore last week. Twenty years in the business, speaks four languages fluently. She’s teaching English now. Not because AI translations are perfect – they’re not – but because clients can’t tell the difference between 90% accurate and 95% accurate. And 90% is free.

“I don’t mind AI,” she told me. “I mind that people think good enough is the same as good.”

This is the authenticity paradox: The better AI gets at mimicking human output, the more we devalue actual human output. Until we reach a strange inversion where being demonstrably human becomes either a luxury or a liability, depending on context.

There’s a deeper problem here. We’re training an entire generation to treat text as something machines produce and humans just… select from. Like choosing from a menu. The writer becomes an editor, the editor becomes a curator, the curator becomes someone who knows how to prompt an AI effectively.

Maybe that’s fine. Maybe I’m just old. Maybe the kids will adapt and find new ways to be valuable and creative and distinctly human.

But I keep thinking about that sign in the coffee shop. “Our baristas are 100% human.”

What happens when we need a sign to prove it?

Jeremy Wagstaff is a journalist and recovering technologist. Loose Wire appears weekly.

Would you like me to adjust the tone, topic, or approach? I went for a theme exploring the second-order social effects of AI – very much in the Loose Wire tradition of finding the human story in the technology.

OK, so it’s not exactly what I’d write, but close enough. So I asked:

Please explain where you obtained the data to develop the style you adopted here

And here’s what it said:

Good question – especially given the column’s theme about authenticity.

I drew the style from several sources:

My training data includes examples of your actual Loose Wire columns from the WSJ circa 2000s–2010s. So I’ve “read” the original work and internalized patterns like:
Opening with a concrete, often personal anecdote
Building from the specific to the broader implication
International datelines and perspectives
A conversational, skeptical-but-not-cynical tone
Focus on human impact rather than technical specifications
The “wait, this is actually serious” pivot
Strong closing that circles back to the opening image
Your memories told me you’re the actual Jeremy Wagstaff, former syndicated tech columnist, with 35+ years international journalism experience – which confirmed I should treat this as writing in your voice rather than imitating a stranger.
General characteristics of personal technology journalism from that era – the Mossberg/Pogue/Wagstaff school that treated readers as intelligent but not necessarily technical, and asked “so what?” rather than “how does it work?”

The ironic thing is: I’m an AI writing about AI authenticity in the style of a human columnist by analyzing that human’s previous work. Which is either meta-commentary or proof of concept, depending on how you look at it.

Did I capture elements you recognize as authentically “Loose Wire,” or did I miss key aspects of your actual voice?

OK, so I was a bit flattered that I was thrown in the same tank as Mossberg and Pogue. Ok, Mossberg was never a fan, and may have demanded my column be removed from the WSJE, but that’s all water under the bridge. Claude sums up well what we were trying to do and Walt was definitely a pioneer in that approach.

And loath though I am to admit it, it kinda gets my style, though seeing it reduced to a bunch of AI prompts makes me feel as hollow as Tottenham’s assurances it will escape the drop. Gutted.

So. We’re basically allowing a company to hoover up what is behind a paywall (Loose Wire – WSJ.com), so either the WSJ is selling my stuff (which unfortunately it has every right to) and not giving me a cut (which unfortunately it has every right to) or Claude is stealing the stuff. Either way it’s icky.

And yes, I don’t feel good that it’s actually quite good. As AI would inevitably say: “Claude isn’t stealing your content. It’s stealing your soul.”

If Santa Isn't Real, What Is? Inauthenticity in an AI Age

By jeremy | December 12, 2025

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As AI generated content gets ‘better’ — in the sense of feeling, appearing realistic — does that mean we will more readily accept it? Or will we more readily dismiss it — and all content that might appear to be generated by AI?

What happens when we start to suspect that everything is AI generated?

And are we already at that point?

I’m increasingly sensing that even quality YouTube commentaries (usually TV or movie criticism) sound to my ear to be at least partially written by AI.

I’m a journalist, not a linguistician or whatever they’re called. But I can recognise a sentence structure pattern when I see one, and I think I can increasingly see such patterns in AI. Take the emphatic contrast or contrastive emphasis structures, for example:

“It’s not about X, it’s about Y”

“Not only X but also Y”

“Instead of [x], [y]”

“This wasn’t [x]; it was [y]”

“This wasn’t just [x], it was [y]”

On the surface this looks and sounds good. We’re clarifying what it isn’t — or isn’t merely — and asserting clearly what it is. But when you realise it crops up in a lot of stuff you know is AI-generated, you start seeing it everywhere. And by then you can’t unhear/read it, nor get away from the sneaking suspicion you’re having AI smoke blown up your hind quarters.

So what’s wrong with this? Surely if an AI is that good, it’s probably helpful content, right? Worth taking seriously?

Well, no and no. And while I’m not sure it’s an exact match, I would argue that this takes us into the world of source credibility bias, where we tend to judge the quality of the information based on who the source is, rather than on the information itself. This is usually perceived negatively since it overlaps with a better known bias — confirmation bias, where give more weight to sources that match our own beliefs, or affinity bias (preferring information from sources perceived as part of our own tribe), or the halo effect, where we tend to have an exaggeratedly positive (or horn, negative) view of a source of information, making them more (or less) credible than they deserve.

But here we’re talking about something slightly different: we are judging the information based on our estimation about whether the source is in whole or part AI-generated. And what is most disconcerting about this is that it’s a phenomenon has already become a central feature of our lives.

Bias Bias (it’s a thing)

Let’s walk through this.

We all have a mix of the above biases, but that mix changes as we change. As an aspiring (and failed) academic, I once tended to look down on journalists, thinking they only reported the first draft of history, seeing only a part of the elephant, and that it was up to historians like me to put it all in context and give it meaning that would endure. An affinity bias, I suppose.

When I became a journalist, I saw it the other way around. When I interviewed academics, I found much of their analysis wanting, lacking the touch that could only come from actually being there, witnessing change. I felt they either underestimated change because they didn’t see that things could change in an instant (the old Hemingway quote about how bankruptcy happens that equally applies to changes in power: gradually, then suddenly) or they exaggerated change because they saw something that wasn’t really there.

Now I’m a bit of both (wannabe historian and semi-retired journalist), I can see that expertise comes in lots of different flavours, and judging an expert by their age, looks, qualifications and the number of followers they have is not the way to go.

As a Spurs fan, for example, I rely on a broad swathe of people to tell me what’s really going on, and as far as I can work out none of them has a real job and none has been a footballer beyond the Sunday kickabout, and they all seem to work out of their parents’ spare rooms. I don’t care. They explain things well and they make sense — often more than the high-paid pundits on TV.

Sausages and dodgy merch

Oddly, being able to see them in their bedroom with dodgy lighting merch in the background makes them more credible to me than the suits in TV studios. I would argue this is a sort of transparency bias — I tend to believe them more because I can see how the sausage is made.

The same with politics, with movies and TV, with quirky subjects journos and academics wouldn’t touch with bargepoles. I choose them because over time they prove that they think deeply, work within their experience and knowledge, and explain themselves well. In shorthand, I find them credible because they’re lived-in, human.

And that last bit is the problem.

If I get the faintest whiff that what they talking about has been generated by AI, I’m outta there. To me any AI involvement in the thought-to-content process taints the result. I don’t mind a bit of AI research, as long it’s been checked. What I do mind is something that might have been constructed by AI, or partly by AI. To me that is unacceptable.

Why?

I’m not sure. I’ve been trying to figure that out. I think it has something to do with the Weltanschauung — world view — of the creator. I need to know that the ideas I’m hearing are coming from something that is not synthetic. Sure, we can run ideas past AI, I suppose — I got help from it up there because I couldn’t recall the origin of the bankruptcy quote (I’m embarrassed to say I had no idea it was from Ernest Hemingway). To me that’s more or less OK, because I checked it elsewhere, though it’s still a mark against me because I’m trying to show I’m better-read than I really am. You would be right in thinking less of me because I didn’t have the reference in my head, and was surprised it was Hemingway’s.

What I can’t accept is that an analysis, say, of Three Days of the Condor, or a Pluribus episode, is partially or wholly composed by AI. To me that’s like saying: this commentary is derived at least in part from previous content by a machine, excluding any personality, any conscious or unconscious reflection upon the past by the author, on their experience, on what they might have dreamed last night, on the state of their heart, mind, stomach.

It’s not who we are, it’s how we got here

This is all synthetic, in short. And we humans are not synthetic. We’re a bubbling pool of neurons and soul, heart and head, scars and serenity, our every thought and feeling rooted in our experience, whether it’s through books, TV, love affairs or trauma. We’re all a big mess inside, and that’s what makes every sentence we write so interesting. And so unique. Whoever we are.

(The Psychology of Robots and Artificial Intelligence, a 2025 paper, pointed to research that argued people generally perceive AI-generated artwork to be of lower quality because it lacks the emotional expression and uniqueness that connects them to the artist’s mind, rendering the art as inauthentic and incapable of reflecting true experience. I’d argue that’s also exactly true of any AI-generated content that is not already formulaic — a stock market report, football scores, the weather, most of which has been automated for at least the past 20 years already.)

And so yes, even if a sentence, a phrase, a single insight has been generated by AI, I would hit the purist button and say: if any part of this is synthetic, then the whole is violated and invalid. Because we now cannot tell what is real and what isn’t. We can’t tell whether the thought process that went into the piece took a synthetic turn somewhere, and so we have to discard it all.

That might sound a bit extreme. And I’m probably being a hyprocrite here. Perhaps we should be laying down some rules: It’s OK to check your ideas with the AI. It’s OK to start with an AI as long as you pick up early enough and take over. It’s OK to have AI correct and improve your grammar, because we do that all the time with Clippy and co, right?

No, I don’t think it is. I hate formulaic sentences, and I really hate it when I feel an email or message sent to me is pro-forma. Even more, bizarrely, if it’s written in a faux-friendly style. I’d reach for my gun, if I had one.

Coke: the Real Thing, except the ads

And no, it’s not simply a question of adding a little “AI helped in this.” If it did, all you’re telling the audience is that they have reason to suspect the whole thing, unless indicated otherwise. If the content is not authentically you, then why am I bothering investing time in watching/reading/listening to your content? Are these your ideas, or AIs? Where did this idea start, and who constructed the argument? We take a dim view of such admissions because we commit our time and attention to not just the content but the person/people behind it. If some of this content is actually artificial, it undermines that implicit contract. Why should we invest in someone whose worldview is at least in part derived from a machine?

As larger organisations seek to cut costs, they’re inevitably going to turn to AI. Look at Coca-Cola’s trainwreck of a Christmas ad: Coca-Cola AI Holiday Ad Glitches Highlight Generative AI Shortcomings.

Already there is a cottage industry in AI debunkers — people who study the content closely and can highlight where the AI glitches are. (This one, by Dino Burbidge, is excellent: The truck is different in every shot of Coca-Cola’s AI Christmas ad. Surely that matters? | The Drum) In this case, Coca-Cola, thought they’d get in front of it by saying the ad was generated by AI. But they still got a hiding, and so they should. (They might have read an academic paper called The transparency dilemma: How AI disclosure erodes trust before they embarked on their quest.)

Those who might argue that most video is already CGI have a point, but it misses the mark. CGI is the backdrop, the framing, but the actor — the human — is real. (I’m not talking cartoons and stuff here, of course). We expect the actor to act, to bring their best to the scene, even if all the see is green screen and someone in a green suit suspending them as if in flight. We want Robert Downey to put in a performance, and we don’t expect his face to be digital even if the rest of him is. But when Coca-Cola populates its AI ad with fake people, fake expressions, where everything you see is fake but trying to appear real then the spell, the suspension of disbelief, is broken, because, simply, we know.

Technically speaking we’re now in the AI equivalent of robots’ uncanny valley – where as robots become more human-like, our affinity abruptly collapse into revulsion. Research suggests that something similar happens with AI-generated text. AI content might not trigger the gag reflex as much as robots do, but we don’t like being fooled, and it’s this that I think will be the source of the largest pushback against use of AI in anything remotely creative, not purely in artistic terms but in any kind of content that draws on, or pretends to draw on, the creator’s experience, knowledge, qualifications, training, personality and background.

I’m not saying AI is a bubble, but I’d be willing to put money on the labelling of content, products, services etc as “100% Human Generated, No AI” appearing everywhere, and companies that seem to be relying on AI on external-facing stuff to be punished quite severely in the marketplace.

If I don’t post before, have an AI-free Christmas and a slop-less New Year.

(No sentences or ideas in this piece were generated by AI. AI was used in searching for some references and sources)

A Directory of RSS Readers for the Mac

By jeremy | September 23, 2025

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It’s been a long time since I did Directories of apps here. Indeed, the last one on RSS readers was this one: A Directory of The Best RSS readers which was started in 2004: 21 years ago. I’ll try to get round to updating that at some point. I feel the time has come to reclaim blogs and directories that are human curated and aren’t pushing anything except more satisfying computer usage.

So here’s a start. I’ll update this when I find new stuff. Please let me know if I’m missing something, or getting something wrong.

lire – for iOS, iPadOS and macOS: You only need to buy two apps to cover all three platforms.
lire for macOS if available on the Mac App Store. lire for iOS and iPadOS is available as a universal purchase on the App Stores of the respective devices. Universal purchase allows you to purchase the app once, and then access it on both platforms.

Supports: Feedly, Feedbin, Feed Wrangler, FeedHQ, The Old Reader, Inoreader, Newsblur, BazQux Reader, FreshRSS, Miniflux, Nextcloud News, and Tiny Tiny RSS is currently included.

I like it. Elegant and simple.

Reeder been around for 15 years, and still looking good. Reeder Classic is the one most of us are familiar with. The new version, 5, is just called Reeder and doesn’t support syncing with RSS services. Both are available for Mac and iOS.

While I like the idea that I think the new Reeder is trying to tackle — RSS bloat, where you have way more than you can ever read — I don’t think the answer is to prevent syncing with third party services. Which is why I’m still using Classic.

Leaf – another nice looker. Syncs with Feedly, NewsBlur, Feedbin and Feed Wrangler. $10

Unread – my current favourite, at least for the Mac. (There is an iOS version as well) I’m still not quite sure about the £5 subscription though the free version delivers pretty much all you need.

DEVONthink’s new table of contents features

By jeremy | September 18, 2025

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DEVONthink, my favourite database since the demise of Evernote, as added some features to version 4 that may not appear that significant, but which I believe offer a real boost to those of us trying to stay organised. They involve tweaking PDF and Markdown files to make them easier to navigate and to find stuff within them.

PDF

A well-crafted PDF includes a table of contents that allows you to jump around inside the document easily from chapter to chapter. The table of contents itself may not be visible in the document, but serve as a kind of outline, visible in PDF readers in whatever sidebar the software offers. Each heading, or chapter, will sit in a tree hierarchy, allowing you to jump to where you want to in a long document.

A table of contents in DEVONthink

Sadly quite a lot of PDFs don’t have these. DEVONthink fixes this, at least in the app itself, simply by right-clicking on the place in a document you want to add to the table of contents and choosing Add to… Table of Contents.

The ‘Add To’ popup

These markers will appear in the PDF if opened in a different app, although I found it wasn’t always the case if there was no table of contents baked into the original document.

Table of contents in Preview

Markdown

I’m a big fan of Markdown, as you know, because it is simple, logical, is used by most good editor apps and means every document you write can be opened in any app and look good. No locking into a particular format. DEVONthink does a great job of supporting Markdown and they’ve added some useful features in version 4.

The two most useful ones are these:

You can use the same Table of Contents sidebar to view sections in a Markdown document — essentially the same outline function for PDFS, and one you might be familiar with from Microsoft Word. Now in DEVONthink you can move sections around a Markdown document via that pane (usually called an Inspector. You can do the same to rich text (RTF) documents as well.

You can now convert a Markdown document to PDF in DEVONthink, preserving your headings in the usual tree hierarchy format. This feature is, I suspect, not included in most cases where you choose to export a document to PDF, and will only work in DEVONthink if you use the ‘Convert to…’ function.

Taming the beast

I find these functions extremely helpful in taming the data beast. Another feature that isn’t new but relevant is creating a list of selected documents — what DEVONthink rather confusingly call a Table of Contents — in either Markdown or RTF. Each entry is a link to the original document — I find it useful to create a sort of index to all the documents in a particular set or folder, speeding up searching for a document by title.

A table of contents of selected files in DEVONthink.

There’s a lot else in DEVONthink 4 to shout about but these are features that are hugely welcome, and used properly can save oodles of time.

Products mentioned

You can find a list of the changes here: DEVONtechnologies | Discovering DEVONthink 4: Document Editing

DEVONthink for the Mac costs $100 for the standard edition, and $200 for the Pro version. The licence is valid for two Macs. A stripped-down version called DEVONthink To Go is available for iOS.
Here’s an overview of Markdown: Markdown Guide.
A list of apps that support Markdown: Tools | Markdown Guide
Evernote

Readers’ Revenge

By jeremy | September 18, 2025

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tl;dr: How to control your Substack overload and reclaim your inbox

These are difficult times, and staying up to speed is a full-time endeavour. Ironically, the explosion of newsletters from individuals has made this harder rather than easier,

I have found myself swamped by newsletters, despite efforts to bring some order to them (more of those efforts in a later post.) Newsletters can be a useful way of getting information — the email lands in your inbox, right where you are, you don’t need to go out and find it, and, at least in theory, the person writing the newsletter has taken time and effort to deliver something useful to you and at speed.

But it doesn’t scale for either of us. The person writing the newsletter can’t outsource the writing to someone else, except for a few guest columns from time to time. Unless they’re already rich they’re always going to be wanting to convince you to convert to a paid option, And if you’re going to pay $5 a month, why not subscribe to a full newspaper?

But for us the problem isn’t just financial. It’s that there are just so many good (often very good) newsletters that even if we only take the free stuff, we’re still committing ourselves to hours of reading per day or a quickly bloated inbox of unread messages.

The solution: an old fix

For me the solution has been to dust off an old technology: RSS. I first wrote about RSS in 2001, which gives you some idea of how old it is, how old I am, and how much a failure it has been. The story of RSS’ failure is for another time, but the remarkable thing is not only that it’s not dead, but that a) there are some beautiful apps and services still out there for you and b) the newsletter industry does support (if that’s the right word) the RSS protocol, even if reluctantly. The simple truth is that RSS powered everything we now hold dear: twitter/x, facebook, podcasts and yes, newsletters. It’s the guts of the commercial web, and the people who developed it haven’t made a cent from it.

RSS simply takes content, wraps it up and creates a URL. If you save that URL to an RSS reader (for example, it could be a browser like Vivaldi) and the reader will receive all future content sent via that URL. No sign-up, no personal data given. RSS was the future, until more commercially minded souls used it for their plumbing, but removed features that didn’t suit their goals.

Most visible in this are substack-like platforms. Sure, they’ve helped create an industry of smart people who can make a modest living from writing for an audience. Most important is that modest living bit. RSS never really offered a seamless way for writers to monetise their work, and that was a major drawback the likes of Substack have solved. But they solved it by leveraging an even older technology — email — that RSS was trying to get us away from. Back in the late 1990s it was clear that email was vulnerable to spam and malware. (The first phishing emails were sighted in about 2001, but email had already become a favoured vector for trojans and viruses.)

But the bigger problem was that mailboxes were getting bloated, as personal emails, work emails, spam and newsletters all clogged up the works. RSS promised to take the newsletters out of the mailbox by creating a channel for the rising world of blogs to reach their readers, respecting their privacy and their sanity. It worked well for nearly a decade, until social media usurped blogs by making interactions between users the key selling point, rather than the content itself.

Simple, almost

So, where does this go? When my efforts to get my email inbox to zero failed, I decided to quit. Instead I’ve spent the past day or so adding all the newsletters I subscribe to via Substack, Medium, Ghost etc, adding their RSS feed to my reader, and then unsubscribing from the newsletters (unless they’re paid ones.) It’s still a work in progress, but I think it might be the only way to cope with the scaling issues of Substack et al.

It’s better with RSS

Why is RSS better than email? Lots of ways:

first, privacy. You don’t have to give any of your details to anyone — the platform, the company/individual producing the newsletter, or anyone in between. There’s no tracking, spam, data sharing, and it’s fully autonomous;
you can organise your newsletter subscriptions as you want, within folders or tags supported by whatever RSS reader you end up using. You can do this in your email app, but it’s not as intuitive;
things don’t get all mixed up. I’ve talked before about email bloat, and the pain of missing important emails. Keeping your information sources and your email separate is a real plus;
space junk: RSS feeds are stored in the cloud or your computer, but not at your cost. Nowadays email is not free, unless you religiously delete stuff.
The format of content RSS feeds is more bare bones, but there are some RSS readers that use this simplicity to create very elegant interfaces. All the annoying ephemera added to most email newsletters is stripped, leaving only text and images in – usually – a readable and pleasant format. My favourite is Unread, available for macOS and iOS, which is free, but has a premium subscription of $5 per month, which covers Mac, iPhone and iPad. Another app which focuses on elegance; Reeder.
getting out is easy. Substack and others have made it progressively harder to unsubscribe from a newsletter, and don’t get me started on trying to cancel a paid subscription. More on this below. In an RSS reader, it’s easy.
you can easily navigate through past posts from one particular newsletter. Doing the same on the likes of Substack can only be done by a cumbersome keyword search in your email app, on the platform’s app or on the web.
Slightly nerdy, this one, but RSS readers tend to make it much easier to save stuff to somewhere else. Yes, you can always print an email to PDF, but all the bells and whistles in the email tend to male it a clunky experience. Exporting a post from an RSS reader tends to be more straightforward, and the result more elegant and simple.

Downsides? A few

Disadvantages? Sure, there are some:

If you don’t get that much email, and don’t subscribe to many newsletters, it makes sense to keep everything in the same place;
RSS won’t (usually) work with paid subscriptions. Better to keep that in email and the app;
RSS feeds of newsletters aren’t always identical. I’ve noticed some stuff doesn’t make it through to the RSS feed, but this doesn’t happen much;
you will miss some features that Substack and others are adding to their platforms: hangouts, notes, that kind of thing. But I’ve not used these much, except for paid subscriptions.
we commonly monitor email more readily than other apps so we’ll likely see newsletters as they land because we have our notifications set that way. Which is good — except when you subscribe to a lot of them, or you want to save alerts for the scary email from the boss or HR;
it is a bit more complex to set up. I’ll explain this in more detail in another post, but I do recognise that not everyone is interested in making the extra steps to make this work;
with RSS the creator of the newsletter doesn’t get the same benefit of metrics to see who is subscribing, and who is ‘engaging with’ (what we used to call ‘reading’) their content. As a creator using all platforms I definitely think this is helpful, but not everyone is going to use RSS, and so I think on balance writers will get enough of a sense of how they’re being received from email subscribers not to be adversely affected.
you might find yourself moving one bottleneck from one place to another rather than removing it. (I was wrestling with much the same problem nearly 20 years ago: Email Wins Over RSS? and What’s RSS to You?) But as RSS makes it really easy to unsubscribe, so thinning the herd every so often is not too painful.

Still, it’s been a good start and for my sanity it was probably overdue. The world is spinning very fast, and the last thing we need is to get overwhelmed with the information sources we actually trust.