Thanks for the article, which raises many interesting questions; some quick, non-exhaustive related thoughts.
The electric guitar, especially when run through various effects layers, creates a machine-assisted sound, but the strumming and picking are still at root human. Jimi Hendrix could still play (bigly) at the bottom of the distortion.
The problem with AI "creative writing" is that the machine is doing the work (such as it is) and the "writer" is just inserting prompts or some sloppy draft that the AI "fixes" and (at present) processes into Velveeta.
You are correct that AI's capabilities will probably improve, yet when struggle and craft are avoided by would-be writers, they fail to be writers. Having AI finish one's stories and poems is like having the spotter finish hoisting the weights at the gym. To claim that one has bench-pressed 200 lbs when the spotter saved one's neck and lifted 110 lbs of the load is not to have lifted 200 lbs, and to remain weak.
The struggle and effort are the whole point--certainly for writers, perhaps less for readers; yet without writers creating the valid human work, the readers downstream are spiritually undernourished. (I'm talking here about more serious literature, not Hollywood pulpy junk, which has been machine-made for decades: a bean-counting script committee is not much different from AI.
Heading out the door: may return later to discuss your points about the serenely virtuous, naive, and enabling "judges" who avoid touching AI and award prizes to machines.
(1) As someone who loves the early Naipaul novels (both Sir Vidia and Shiva) I would normally be thrilled to see a Trinidadian writer getting recognition.
(2) The story is absolutely ripe and rich with the deep Trini aura and feel that so many writers have explored.
(3) Even if its not AI, so much of the writing is overwrought and bad with the metaphors - “Her hair is midnight rain; her laugh is bright as zinc” / “Doing is a treacherous bridge: you step on and it carries you to a side you didn’t plan to reach.” / “Sita kept a cheap copybook with a red line that was less a margin than a joke.”
(4) The writing itself should have made judges reconsider if it deserved a merit award.
(5) If it is AI, then AI is capable of 'vibe pastiche' whilst being unable to actually distinguish what is good writing within that pastiche
(6) However, what if one day, to use the Trinidadian example, a writer emerges who in their early work is influenced by the Caribbean canon and so their writing resembles it? How do we distinguish between influence and people claiming they are AI enabled? If AI just reconstitues what it is scraped? That is worrying.
(7) At some point, writers who have not used AI will be accused of AI. This will lead to paranoia and witch hunts.
(8) I'm worried.
(9) Is this a dividing line between eras? Pre AI and Post AI? If all AI does is pastiche what was written before then perhaps literature from the Pre AI era will become viewed as a pristine canon that was not suspect.
(10) How will new voices emerge if they will be suspected of not being the voice of a true literary consciousness and soul?
(11) Olga Tokarczuk - Nobel laureate - has spoken of how she uses AI as a collaborative tool in her writing in some ways. Seems like she's saying it should be harnessed in some ways. But this makes us ask - a hybrid literature where human creativity is abetted by AI response to ideas etc. Is that literature.
Regarding [11]--she has clarified that she doesn't write with the AI and uses it just for looking things up (which she says she then verifies). The correction is on LitHub, who owes her for the misinterpretation. With that said, I found your points provocative!
thanks for clarifying. AI as an instantaneous beta reader or research tool is different to using it to write whole swathes of prose. There are still grey areas and dangers there, but yes it seems like she has been nuanced and I think we're going to face up to the things she raises, its not going away
if you have access to twitter, Will Self has written something about this affair. A couple of quotes:
"The Granta affair is not simply an embarrassing editorial oversight. It is the first genuinely literary manifestation of a much larger civilisational fracture: institutions charged with preserving style can no longer reliably recognise it."
"This occurs because the large language model optimises statistically for plausibility at sentence level. What it cannot sustain is style in the deeper sense: the circulation of pressure, contradiction, temporality and embodiment across an entire work. Real literary style resembles a living body. Pressure exerted in one region is registered elsewhere. Damage to one part reverberates through the whole. Even amputation leaves phantom sensation. Style possesses exactly this distributed organic character. Machine prose, however fluent, remains fundamentally modular."
Well said and spot on for your recognition of the likely inevitable. But is it "the literary world needs to wake up!", or is it "wait and see"? These are two different things.
We all have to wait regardless. While waiting, I'm reading lots of people carrying on about ‘taste’, as if we should forget everything since Hume. Season those missives with ‘moral’ and ‘purpose’ and bring out ‘humanist’ for special effect, and watch peoples eyes glaze over.
All of those complaints seem the mental equivalent of building a hut on the beach as the tsunami approaches. They are, each one, cart-horse. They begin with the person who is encountering the writing, and their aesthetic judgment, and not the source of the writing itself.
If you call yourself a writer, and you are the last person on earth, and everyone else is gone, and all of your survival needs are met, and you are completely and utterly alone … would you still write? In your answer is an antidote to your existential angst.
It’s coming.
Gutenberg, Tim Berners-Lee, now AI. Some functions of writing will change, just as has happened with imagery. I still paint. Painting isn’t going anywhere. The tools change, not the source.
Quentin Tarantino has shared why he makes movies, "I love them! I love my movies - I'm making them for me, everybody else is invited.” Tarantino has to write them out by hand on a yellow legal pad with certain pens, or he can’t do it. He can’t type them. Hemingway had to do it standing up.
How do you do it, but most importantly, WHY? Start there.
I wrote about this myself actually. The fact that this type of writing is so easily reproducible by LLMs (if indeed that’s happened in this case) is very worrying.
However to me it’s already an indictment of the complacency so characteristic of the current ‘literary’ register. This Granta story is in my opinion not exceptional writing; it doesn’t stretch the craft, or the form. Instead it retreads the same formulaic ground covered a million times over. In essence it has all the hallmarks of what Gabriel Josipovici railed against fifteen years ago. A kind of polish and satisfaction it hasn’t earned.
This is the state of the market in 2026, and the fact AI can reproduce such writing so easily suggests as much about the market as it does about the writer. But writers too are giving up the fight. Modernism and postmodernism used to be so much bolder in vision, scope and craftsmanship.
AI may get to the point where doubt becomes the new orientation to all creative work, but I think there’s a responsibility to push back on this as long as possible; not just by writing but actually trying something new. Editors are also involved in this task to ground the work in tradition but also see it expand.
I’m not interested in reading fiction written by AI, even if I can’t tell the difference, because a) it feels like a rug pull and b) art, to me, is an intrinsically human endeavor, inseparable from the consciousness needed to create, consume, and consider it. It is an unquantifiable, inter-subjective mode of human expression—and therefore incompatible with statistical models, which are not conscious and yet are claimed by AI evangelists to stand in for the human element. I don’t care if AI can write Moby Dick—it’s not conscious, and therefore not interesting.
I recently discovered some really wonderful music on a you tube channel. When I found out it was AI generated I quit listening to it. I gather that some would say I bite my nose to spite my face but, I'm sorry, I believe art is something made with human minds human hearts human hands. To think otherwise is to devalue all that came before us, and it renders our most inspired work meaningless. It also makes a mockery of hard work, and that bothers me a great deal. The idea that AI generated art is inevitable and acceptable is deeply depressing.
The sensible thing is to have the backbone to admit using a tool built on mass theft and so that everyone else can choose not to read their work. Also to value human writing over synthetic folly. It really is that simple. And poetry written with GenAI is the most ridiculous thing I’ve read and an insult to the craft. I choose life. This tech bro wet dream will make one hell of a stink when it bursts.
'... has no purpose, and can only offer paltry satisfactions to a reader who knows this to be so.'
Well, that's already been disproven.
Apparently lots and lots of people are perfectly satisfied with AI generated fiction and non fiction, even when they know it's AI generated.
Sadly, the people don't care. The horse has already bolted, etc. Readers are fine with that. Maybe the more pertinent question is why readers don't care. Why the vibe has become sufficient for satisfaction.
If Heidegger was alive (and, er, not canceled --- or is he still cancelled? I can't keep track), he might revisit "The Question Concerning Technology" (to say nothing of "The Origin of the Work of Art," although in my view it is not nearly as useful as his reading of technology) in interesting ways. Or an AI might. It could be hard to tell!
For now, speaking personally, I am hands-off on AI, to the extent this is possible. I pay attention to the great un/natural experiment our culture is having with it and do my best to remain open-minded. For now, though, AI-generated work gives me the same impression drinking a sugar-free drink does: it leaves me with an intense craving for something real.
I think many of the objections to *and* defenses of AI in art, writing, scholarship are point-missing, ideologically over-committed, and premature. I am not a historian, but from casual reading see a casual resemblance of these objections and defenses to past objections to / defenses of the printing press, film, internet ... and probably, if one goes back far enough, writing itself ('it will kill oral culture!').
I will be very surprised if AI turns out to offer a net benefit to our culture, in terms of democracy, understanding, security, and freedom [The high degree of monopolization in the tech market and its increasing entwinement with state actors is itself already a serious threat to democracy.] But will it be a net harm to the so-called culture industries? I think AI is highly likely to become fully enmeshed in mass media (not hard to do, when so much pop music, so many television series and some genre fiction is already so formulaic it could have been produced by a bot -- not a complete diss here as I love mass media, but a lot of it is so much sameness).
Baudrillard LOLed.
I expect there will continue to be (as there is now) a premium on 'high art,' including literature. Authenticity, originality, and exclusivity will continue to be valued (in market terms). Average people will still likely be able to access high art via digital collections and at museums and via postcards and posters of famous works -- unless most of those end up privatized and locked away even digitally, in bids to protect their exclusivity.
And there will be, as it is already increasingly obvious, a complete glut of AI-generated product.
But I have concerns about what will happen to the middle space most of us inhabit, somewhere between mass media and high art. Will there still be a rich supply of interesting middle-of-the-road works that encourage us to think but yet remain accessible to a broad range of the population? Will print books written by real authors become scarce, or too expensive for the average person to access? Will the media most people consume become increasingly AI-produced and bot/algorithm-driven, until even the illusion of choice vanishes? Will AI, rather than being a tool any average person can use to create whatever, be instead harnessed by states and state-aligned actors to serve ideologically narrow agendas?
At its heyday in the twentieth century, the wide availability of an incredible array of books, magazines, newspapers, films, television shows and art movements contributed to the enrichment and expansion of democracy. It is not coincidental that this flourishing occurred in an open market environment in which publishers and studios competed and therefore innovated.
Monopolization in the culture industries (circa 2000 this was referred to as 'media convergence') and the increasing alignment of monopolistic technology corporations with governments led increasingly by would-be authoritarians is the root problem. In this sense AI may be just a symptom.
‘Liking’ this feels wrong, but I do thank you, Henry, for your words on this.
It makes me wonder if reading human-made stories v. AI will someday be akin to buying our food from the farmers market/direct from farmers v. buying from Kroger (insert your own giant chain grocery store here). Because I think you’re right, some number of people just won’t care the source of the work if they like it and find it compelling, entertaining, etc. (whatever makes people read).
Agree, it's so easy to make fashionable, unthinking, statements about how a work is worthless if there's no human mind behind it. And yet if an AI at some point produces an equivalent of Kubla Khan, how could we not read it? If it's as good as Kubla Khan then it will be a thrill to read, an addictive substance. I read literature for the joy it gives me, not for some abstract concept of a human writer's mind that happens to be behind it.
I suspect we have years of hypocrisy ahead of us with the use of genAI. That’s hundreds of thousands of writers who use it and will swear they don’t. I think some of the most vociferous critics of AI have never used it. I think there are perfectly viable uses for genAI that don't involve having it create prose for you. You can even customize it with rules such as: never offer text suggestions, cleaned-up versions of texts or word substitutions. It's good at organizing things. This is its main strength. It can research things for you and it supplies the sources, so you can check those manually. People just have to be a little smart about this. Take what's useful and dismiss the rest because using it to write prose (ethical questions aside) gives you slop, as so many people have already pointed out. It's the difference between listening to a Chopin Nocturne as played by a real pianist and listening to the same piece on a player piano.
Your thinking here reminds me of the kerfuffle surrounding Milli Vanilli years ago, where fans felt cheated when it was revealed that the shirtless hunks in the video weren’t on the recording. As a non-fan, I felt that people who enjoyed the music should have continued to enjoy it.
With AI, I don’t share the popular anti-AI kneejerk position that AI is evil; I don’t like the kind of writing it does, and I don’t like it when humans do that kind of writing either. It’s of no consequence to me whether the writing I don’t want to read was generated by a program or written by a human. And it seems reasonable to jump from that to me being willing to accept AI writing if I love it. I don’t expect that to happen, but who knows?
I continue to feel that mediocre human writers are the real villains, and if AI pushes mediocre writers off the chessboard, it’s hard for me to see that as a terrible result.
I have an AI generated short story that doesn’t read like AI, because it was the eighth or tenth iteration, specifically instructing on what not to do, to revise the parts that smelt ‘default’ or the kind of metaphors you would criticise a student for using (where a student has absorbed the idea of metaphor as a writerly technique). Treat it like a precocious 15 year old, absurdly well read and incredibly naive.
I might run it through and see how it scores.
(I’m not saying it’s a great short story - I was approaching it more from ‘how can I push this system into doing something it’s not intended to’)
There’s little commercial sense in Claude or ChatGPT being able to write originally and well in their default state - the goal is to create a wonderfully clear writer of non-fiction, not an original voice.
The underlying model is clearly capable of a lot more than the default tone
Thanks for the article, which raises many interesting questions; some quick, non-exhaustive related thoughts.
The electric guitar, especially when run through various effects layers, creates a machine-assisted sound, but the strumming and picking are still at root human. Jimi Hendrix could still play (bigly) at the bottom of the distortion.
The problem with AI "creative writing" is that the machine is doing the work (such as it is) and the "writer" is just inserting prompts or some sloppy draft that the AI "fixes" and (at present) processes into Velveeta.
You are correct that AI's capabilities will probably improve, yet when struggle and craft are avoided by would-be writers, they fail to be writers. Having AI finish one's stories and poems is like having the spotter finish hoisting the weights at the gym. To claim that one has bench-pressed 200 lbs when the spotter saved one's neck and lifted 110 lbs of the load is not to have lifted 200 lbs, and to remain weak.
The struggle and effort are the whole point--certainly for writers, perhaps less for readers; yet without writers creating the valid human work, the readers downstream are spiritually undernourished. (I'm talking here about more serious literature, not Hollywood pulpy junk, which has been machine-made for decades: a bean-counting script committee is not much different from AI.
Heading out the door: may return later to discuss your points about the serenely virtuous, naive, and enabling "judges" who avoid touching AI and award prizes to machines.
Have a good weekend, everyone. Ted C.
Some thoughts:
(1) As someone who loves the early Naipaul novels (both Sir Vidia and Shiva) I would normally be thrilled to see a Trinidadian writer getting recognition.
(2) The story is absolutely ripe and rich with the deep Trini aura and feel that so many writers have explored.
(3) Even if its not AI, so much of the writing is overwrought and bad with the metaphors - “Her hair is midnight rain; her laugh is bright as zinc” / “Doing is a treacherous bridge: you step on and it carries you to a side you didn’t plan to reach.” / “Sita kept a cheap copybook with a red line that was less a margin than a joke.”
(4) The writing itself should have made judges reconsider if it deserved a merit award.
(5) If it is AI, then AI is capable of 'vibe pastiche' whilst being unable to actually distinguish what is good writing within that pastiche
(6) However, what if one day, to use the Trinidadian example, a writer emerges who in their early work is influenced by the Caribbean canon and so their writing resembles it? How do we distinguish between influence and people claiming they are AI enabled? If AI just reconstitues what it is scraped? That is worrying.
(7) At some point, writers who have not used AI will be accused of AI. This will lead to paranoia and witch hunts.
(8) I'm worried.
(9) Is this a dividing line between eras? Pre AI and Post AI? If all AI does is pastiche what was written before then perhaps literature from the Pre AI era will become viewed as a pristine canon that was not suspect.
(10) How will new voices emerge if they will be suspected of not being the voice of a true literary consciousness and soul?
(11) Olga Tokarczuk - Nobel laureate - has spoken of how she uses AI as a collaborative tool in her writing in some ways. Seems like she's saying it should be harnessed in some ways. But this makes us ask - a hybrid literature where human creativity is abetted by AI response to ideas etc. Is that literature.
(12) I dont know. But the dam has burst
Good stuff; my machine wouldn't let me hit the "like" button, so I am replying instead. :) Best TC
Regarding [11]--she has clarified that she doesn't write with the AI and uses it just for looking things up (which she says she then verifies). The correction is on LitHub, who owes her for the misinterpretation. With that said, I found your points provocative!
thanks for clarifying. AI as an instantaneous beta reader or research tool is different to using it to write whole swathes of prose. There are still grey areas and dangers there, but yes it seems like she has been nuanced and I think we're going to face up to the things she raises, its not going away
Point 7 - already happening; some writers have run their own work through AI checks and the machine has told them it's partly or more written by AI.
if you have access to twitter, Will Self has written something about this affair. A couple of quotes:
"The Granta affair is not simply an embarrassing editorial oversight. It is the first genuinely literary manifestation of a much larger civilisational fracture: institutions charged with preserving style can no longer reliably recognise it."
"This occurs because the large language model optimises statistically for plausibility at sentence level. What it cannot sustain is style in the deeper sense: the circulation of pressure, contradiction, temporality and embodiment across an entire work. Real literary style resembles a living body. Pressure exerted in one region is registered elsewhere. Damage to one part reverberates through the whole. Even amputation leaves phantom sensation. Style possesses exactly this distributed organic character. Machine prose, however fluent, remains fundamentally modular."
Well said and spot on for your recognition of the likely inevitable. But is it "the literary world needs to wake up!", or is it "wait and see"? These are two different things.
We all have to wait regardless. While waiting, I'm reading lots of people carrying on about ‘taste’, as if we should forget everything since Hume. Season those missives with ‘moral’ and ‘purpose’ and bring out ‘humanist’ for special effect, and watch peoples eyes glaze over.
All of those complaints seem the mental equivalent of building a hut on the beach as the tsunami approaches. They are, each one, cart-horse. They begin with the person who is encountering the writing, and their aesthetic judgment, and not the source of the writing itself.
If you call yourself a writer, and you are the last person on earth, and everyone else is gone, and all of your survival needs are met, and you are completely and utterly alone … would you still write? In your answer is an antidote to your existential angst.
It’s coming.
Gutenberg, Tim Berners-Lee, now AI. Some functions of writing will change, just as has happened with imagery. I still paint. Painting isn’t going anywhere. The tools change, not the source.
Quentin Tarantino has shared why he makes movies, "I love them! I love my movies - I'm making them for me, everybody else is invited.” Tarantino has to write them out by hand on a yellow legal pad with certain pens, or he can’t do it. He can’t type them. Hemingway had to do it standing up.
How do you do it, but most importantly, WHY? Start there.
Yes. It’s always why.
I wrote about this myself actually. The fact that this type of writing is so easily reproducible by LLMs (if indeed that’s happened in this case) is very worrying.
However to me it’s already an indictment of the complacency so characteristic of the current ‘literary’ register. This Granta story is in my opinion not exceptional writing; it doesn’t stretch the craft, or the form. Instead it retreads the same formulaic ground covered a million times over. In essence it has all the hallmarks of what Gabriel Josipovici railed against fifteen years ago. A kind of polish and satisfaction it hasn’t earned.
This is the state of the market in 2026, and the fact AI can reproduce such writing so easily suggests as much about the market as it does about the writer. But writers too are giving up the fight. Modernism and postmodernism used to be so much bolder in vision, scope and craftsmanship.
AI may get to the point where doubt becomes the new orientation to all creative work, but I think there’s a responsibility to push back on this as long as possible; not just by writing but actually trying something new. Editors are also involved in this task to ground the work in tradition but also see it expand.
I’m not interested in reading fiction written by AI, even if I can’t tell the difference, because a) it feels like a rug pull and b) art, to me, is an intrinsically human endeavor, inseparable from the consciousness needed to create, consume, and consider it. It is an unquantifiable, inter-subjective mode of human expression—and therefore incompatible with statistical models, which are not conscious and yet are claimed by AI evangelists to stand in for the human element. I don’t care if AI can write Moby Dick—it’s not conscious, and therefore not interesting.
“ It is so easy to say that stories have to be human written.”
That’s because it is true.
Sure, one could use an LLM to produce something. But that person isn’t an author in the same way that a musician using autotune isn’t a singer.
I recently discovered some really wonderful music on a you tube channel. When I found out it was AI generated I quit listening to it. I gather that some would say I bite my nose to spite my face but, I'm sorry, I believe art is something made with human minds human hearts human hands. To think otherwise is to devalue all that came before us, and it renders our most inspired work meaningless. It also makes a mockery of hard work, and that bothers me a great deal. The idea that AI generated art is inevitable and acceptable is deeply depressing.
The sensible thing is to have the backbone to admit using a tool built on mass theft and so that everyone else can choose not to read their work. Also to value human writing over synthetic folly. It really is that simple. And poetry written with GenAI is the most ridiculous thing I’ve read and an insult to the craft. I choose life. This tech bro wet dream will make one hell of a stink when it bursts.
'... has no purpose, and can only offer paltry satisfactions to a reader who knows this to be so.'
Well, that's already been disproven.
Apparently lots and lots of people are perfectly satisfied with AI generated fiction and non fiction, even when they know it's AI generated.
Sadly, the people don't care. The horse has already bolted, etc. Readers are fine with that. Maybe the more pertinent question is why readers don't care. Why the vibe has become sufficient for satisfaction.
If Heidegger was alive (and, er, not canceled --- or is he still cancelled? I can't keep track), he might revisit "The Question Concerning Technology" (to say nothing of "The Origin of the Work of Art," although in my view it is not nearly as useful as his reading of technology) in interesting ways. Or an AI might. It could be hard to tell!
For now, speaking personally, I am hands-off on AI, to the extent this is possible. I pay attention to the great un/natural experiment our culture is having with it and do my best to remain open-minded. For now, though, AI-generated work gives me the same impression drinking a sugar-free drink does: it leaves me with an intense craving for something real.
I think many of the objections to *and* defenses of AI in art, writing, scholarship are point-missing, ideologically over-committed, and premature. I am not a historian, but from casual reading see a casual resemblance of these objections and defenses to past objections to / defenses of the printing press, film, internet ... and probably, if one goes back far enough, writing itself ('it will kill oral culture!').
I will be very surprised if AI turns out to offer a net benefit to our culture, in terms of democracy, understanding, security, and freedom [The high degree of monopolization in the tech market and its increasing entwinement with state actors is itself already a serious threat to democracy.] But will it be a net harm to the so-called culture industries? I think AI is highly likely to become fully enmeshed in mass media (not hard to do, when so much pop music, so many television series and some genre fiction is already so formulaic it could have been produced by a bot -- not a complete diss here as I love mass media, but a lot of it is so much sameness).
Baudrillard LOLed.
I expect there will continue to be (as there is now) a premium on 'high art,' including literature. Authenticity, originality, and exclusivity will continue to be valued (in market terms). Average people will still likely be able to access high art via digital collections and at museums and via postcards and posters of famous works -- unless most of those end up privatized and locked away even digitally, in bids to protect their exclusivity.
And there will be, as it is already increasingly obvious, a complete glut of AI-generated product.
But I have concerns about what will happen to the middle space most of us inhabit, somewhere between mass media and high art. Will there still be a rich supply of interesting middle-of-the-road works that encourage us to think but yet remain accessible to a broad range of the population? Will print books written by real authors become scarce, or too expensive for the average person to access? Will the media most people consume become increasingly AI-produced and bot/algorithm-driven, until even the illusion of choice vanishes? Will AI, rather than being a tool any average person can use to create whatever, be instead harnessed by states and state-aligned actors to serve ideologically narrow agendas?
At its heyday in the twentieth century, the wide availability of an incredible array of books, magazines, newspapers, films, television shows and art movements contributed to the enrichment and expansion of democracy. It is not coincidental that this flourishing occurred in an open market environment in which publishers and studios competed and therefore innovated.
Monopolization in the culture industries (circa 2000 this was referred to as 'media convergence') and the increasing alignment of monopolistic technology corporations with governments led increasingly by would-be authoritarians is the root problem. In this sense AI may be just a symptom.
‘Liking’ this feels wrong, but I do thank you, Henry, for your words on this.
It makes me wonder if reading human-made stories v. AI will someday be akin to buying our food from the farmers market/direct from farmers v. buying from Kroger (insert your own giant chain grocery store here). Because I think you’re right, some number of people just won’t care the source of the work if they like it and find it compelling, entertaining, etc. (whatever makes people read).
Agree, it's so easy to make fashionable, unthinking, statements about how a work is worthless if there's no human mind behind it. And yet if an AI at some point produces an equivalent of Kubla Khan, how could we not read it? If it's as good as Kubla Khan then it will be a thrill to read, an addictive substance. I read literature for the joy it gives me, not for some abstract concept of a human writer's mind that happens to be behind it.
I suspect we have years of hypocrisy ahead of us with the use of genAI. That’s hundreds of thousands of writers who use it and will swear they don’t. I think some of the most vociferous critics of AI have never used it. I think there are perfectly viable uses for genAI that don't involve having it create prose for you. You can even customize it with rules such as: never offer text suggestions, cleaned-up versions of texts or word substitutions. It's good at organizing things. This is its main strength. It can research things for you and it supplies the sources, so you can check those manually. People just have to be a little smart about this. Take what's useful and dismiss the rest because using it to write prose (ethical questions aside) gives you slop, as so many people have already pointed out. It's the difference between listening to a Chopin Nocturne as played by a real pianist and listening to the same piece on a player piano.
Your thinking here reminds me of the kerfuffle surrounding Milli Vanilli years ago, where fans felt cheated when it was revealed that the shirtless hunks in the video weren’t on the recording. As a non-fan, I felt that people who enjoyed the music should have continued to enjoy it.
With AI, I don’t share the popular anti-AI kneejerk position that AI is evil; I don’t like the kind of writing it does, and I don’t like it when humans do that kind of writing either. It’s of no consequence to me whether the writing I don’t want to read was generated by a program or written by a human. And it seems reasonable to jump from that to me being willing to accept AI writing if I love it. I don’t expect that to happen, but who knows?
I continue to feel that mediocre human writers are the real villains, and if AI pushes mediocre writers off the chessboard, it’s hard for me to see that as a terrible result.
I have an AI generated short story that doesn’t read like AI, because it was the eighth or tenth iteration, specifically instructing on what not to do, to revise the parts that smelt ‘default’ or the kind of metaphors you would criticise a student for using (where a student has absorbed the idea of metaphor as a writerly technique). Treat it like a precocious 15 year old, absurdly well read and incredibly naive.
I might run it through and see how it scores.
(I’m not saying it’s a great short story - I was approaching it more from ‘how can I push this system into doing something it’s not intended to’)
There’s little commercial sense in Claude or ChatGPT being able to write originally and well in their default state - the goal is to create a wonderfully clear writer of non-fiction, not an original voice.
The underlying model is clearly capable of a lot more than the default tone