Why One Tech CEO Is Wary of AI-Written Documents at Work

Kakul Srivastava runs Splice, the sample platform that many music producers rely on, and she has spent her career where Silicon Valley meets creative work, with earlier executive roles at Flickr, Yahoo, GitHub and Adobe. In a questionnaire interview published by The Verge on October 2, 2026, she made a point that has little to do with music and a great deal to do with everyday writing. She said she is careful about AI-written documents inside her own company, and her reasoning is worth a close look for students and professionals alike.

Her explanation starts with how the company works. Splice is remote-first, so, as she put it, there is no hallway where ideas get tested in passing. What the company has instead is a habit: somebody sits down and actually thinks something through in writing, and then a group of people argue with it. According to Srivastava, almost everything good that has happened at the company started that way. In that setting a document is not a formality. It is the place where one person commits to a line of thought so that colleagues have something solid to push against.

That is why authorship matters to her. Srivastava told The Verge that once readers cannot tell whether there is a person behind the words, the conversation they have about a document becomes a different conversation, and a worse one. She added that there is no easy way back from that point, and that she thinks the same is true of music. The concern is not that the sentences read badly. It is that readers stop arguing with the thinking, because they are no longer sure whose thinking it is or whether anyone is prepared to stand behind it.

The interview also carried a piece of writing advice that needs no software at all. Asked about advice she values, Srivastava said to say the thing, then explain it. Do not lay out all of your proof first in the hope that it earns you the right to make your point. In her view nobody is listening to the proof yet. They are listening for whether you sound like you believe what you are saying, and the confidence of a clear claim is what makes room for the explanation that follows. Essay writers will recognise this as the case for a thesis placed early.

The two ideas fit together. A writer who states a position early and then defends it is visibly present in the text, which is exactly what Srivastava fears goes missing when a document is generated rather than written. For students, that suggests a practical test for any draft, however it was produced. Could you defend each paragraph out loud if a tutor or a colleague challenged it? If the answer is no, the draft is not finished, and polishing the wording will not fix the gap. The missing piece is the thinking that a reader expects to find behind the words.

None of this amounts to a ban on tools, and Srivastava did not describe one. The Verge notes that Splice has made a point of offering AI products that keep the human at the centre of the creative process, and that she has argued against the push-button approach to making songs. Applied to writing, the same line is easy to draw. Using software to check grammar, tighten a sentence or summarise your own notes leaves your reasoning intact. Handing over the argument itself is different, because the argument is the part other people came to discuss.

It is worth being clear about the limits of the source. This was one executive describing how her own company likes to work, in a short interview, not a study of workplace writing or a policy for anyone else. Still, the instinct travels well. Before you share a document, check that the main claim appears early, that every section is something you would stand behind in a conversation, and that readers can tell a person did the thinking. If you used AI along the way, saying so plainly is usually better than leaving readers to guess.