The news regarding artificial intelligence’s intrusion into the world of writing, editing, and publishing is not, dear reader, heartening. Since my May 20 post about AI’s intrusion into the world of writers and writing (“Crossing the AI Rubicon,” about allegations a short story created by a large learning model, or LLM, won a prestigious literary prize), much more has transpired, and it all confirms that we are now in new territory. The AI ick is unavoidable. It’s seeping under our doors and through the cracks of our windowsills like some alien life form in a 1960s horror movie. Or like sewage spewing from a backed up septic system. It ain’t pretty. And it shows no sign of abatement.
Among many recent AI-related stories that make me cringe, if not rage:
1. The AI-pocalypse is here
So proclaims Becky L. Tuch in her recent Lit Mag News piece, “Q: The AI-Pocalypse is here. How do we even deal?“
“Sad truth: AI-generated writing is everywhere now,” she begins. “It’s in articles on prominent news sites, it’s in YouTube videos, it’s in the comments sections on articles and it’s in many articles here on Substack …”
AI is so prevalent, even Becky, ever vigilant at sniffing out AI-generated or -influenced writing, she fesses up to linking to “at least two articles” in a recent newsletter that she “suspected were at least partly generated with AI. Yet I linked to the pieces anyway. I know, I know. Yet in spite of my many misgivings, the content was relevant. And, for the love of all that is holy, such articles are frankly harder and harder to avoid.”
Becky loathes “the sound of AI-generated text”–as do I and most writers I know. She continues to share why:
It is not just bad writing. The bad-writing missteps that humans make include too much backstory, long digressions into a character’s feelings, telling a feeling rather than showing it. In nonfiction, human missteps include too much throat-clearing, articles which never get to any particular point or which limp flaccidly under the weight of contradictions and undeveloped ideas.
AI-generated text, by contrast, is highly proficient. It builds to riveting climaxes. It spins vapid and meaningless events into epic sagas.
Perhaps this proficiency is why so many are leaning into using AI for writing.
As for the question of her headline–“How do we even deal?”–she offers a quiz, not unlike those that used to populate glossy “women’s” magazines of old like Cosmopolitan or the more common, checkout-line publications like Women’s World. Give the entire post a read.
2. Apparently, some horror writers ain’t skeered of AI
That’s the conclusion I draw from a recent blog post from writer Keith Roysdon.
Keith outlines the issues related to this column’s pro-AI stance and, in an important aside, spells out why promoting AI is, essentially, evil.
AI kills careers and it kills people. It takes work and money away from writers and editors and artists and musicians AND DOES ALL OF THEIR WORK IN A WORSE MANNER and the data centers that power AI are killing the planet, using up mammoth amounts of water to cool their technology, befouling the environment with hundreds of diesel engines that power data centers, committing sound pollution in poor neighborhoods – and they’re often in poor neighborhoods, isn’t that a surprise? – and generally making life worse for everyone except the people who own the AI companies and data centers.
I hope you’ll take the time to give Keith’s post a read.
3. ‘It takes a profession that I love and turns it into a soul-crushing curse.’
Dealing with the specter of AI as a writer is horrible enough. We can continue to write to our heart’s content without ever consulting ChatGPT or any other LLM, and can be at peace knowing that, despite our use of em dashes or any other so-called “tells” of AI usage, our writing is 100 percent human. But teachers–particularly teachers of English or other writing-intensive disciplines–must deal with AI’s pervasiveness in the student body they are charged with teaching.
“Where I once in-formed young minds, I now work to undo the de-formed,” writes Barbara Castle, who teaches English at Arkansas State University, in her marvelous essay “I Prefer Not To: Literary Laments in the Age of AI Dead Letters.”
The falsely self-assured plagiarist who claims the inhuman derived prose is their own “instead of the cross, the Albatross / about [their] neck is hung.” A weight they are beginning to consider, as Jeff Sharlet points out in this article in The Chronicles of Higher Education. The visible burden of an inflated GPA they did not earn is causing “corroded mental health,” cynicism, and “some are filled with guilt.” I too, pay a similar price in a current system where credentials risk losing their meaning. Simulated competence “yaws and founders” toward shipwreck. Employers cry fraud. Students cry fraud. Instructors cry fraud. And universities cry “fraud” too, though the confusion may be one they helped create.
She adds: “Passing grades for those who did not do the work is a moral injury to both student and teacher. Ethical dissonance over time wears the psyche down. The injustice of the C student, who does their own work, and the A student that does not, will the piper pay. The spuriously gained fake scholarship will cost us all—one day. Dostoevsky understood this. The crime may remain invisible. The punishment will not.”
The Faustian bargain of using AI to cheat for a good grade will unfortunately stick with us. And maybe it will creep into other, non-academic aspects of our reading and writing lives (see item 4, below).
4. Maybe students could use AI to help understand books, like this journalist at Axios
By now we’ve heard about students no longer being required to read whole books for classes. Reading books is just so dang hard and time consuming! Maybe the answer is to have an AI tool to help readers make sense of those big ol’ novels, especially in this era of diminished attention spans. That’s what Nicholas Johnston, the publisher of a punchy, to-the-point newsletter called Axios, is doing. In his article “Robot book club,” he writes:
AI has become my reading buddy as I’ve plowed through my summer book list, helping me keep track of plots and characters, unpack themes, and make sense of wordy, old prose.
“The way many of us actually read books — a few pages before bed, a chapter at the beach, another on a plane — makes it easy to lose the thread,” he writes. “AI can help you pick it back up without starting over.”
To help him plow through James Fenimore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans, which was “far too dense for casual vacation reading,” he prompted his AI assistant to be his “guide” to “help me understand what I’ve read and where the story is, without giving spoilers or getting ahead of my progress.” The robot acknowledged the difficulty with Cooper’s prose–his “sentences are long and his diction is archaic”–and promised to give Johnston “a recap of what’s happened so far and clarify anything confusing. … I’ll stick strictly to what you’ve read. No hints about what’s coming.”
Well, at least he’s trying to read. That counts for something, doesn’t it?
Some on literary Twitter don’t much care for Johnston’s approach (which, by the way, is consistent with Axios‘ strong pro-AI stance in journalism and communications).
As someone who was required to read eleven novels for one college course–who knew that a course called The American Novel would require so much reading?!–I wonder if I would have taken advantage of an AI assistant the way Johnston is, and would have contributed to my own cognitive decline, the way Katherine Argent (aka @effthealgorithm) suggests Johnston is doing? Maybe if he picked something a bit lighter for his vacation read, he wouldn’t feel the need to rely on AI.
5. Speaking of ‘eff the algorithm’… eff the AI!
The last words of this Friday Five go to Ann Handley, an insightful and entertaining writer who’s focused mainly on the business of marketing writing. The following comes from the latest version of her fortnightly newsletter, Total Annarchy, which anyone who writes anything should subscribe to, in my opinion. Her latest newsletter is titled “AI slop, accusations, and a better way,” and it’s just such a damn good article that I’m quoting from it extensively.
AI learned all it knows from hoovering up what we all have written for generations, in books both good and bad, in both beautiful prose and the clunky text riddled with cliches and crutches. AI sucked it all up without discernment, because AI cannot discern. It mashed The Odyssey with How to Talk to Your Cat About Gun Safety with a Reddit post about fixing your dishwasher and then let it gurgle in its gut a bit before it burped it back out as “models” we can use to “write.”
Except it’s not “writing.” It’s just data. That’s not pejorative. It just is.
And by the way, “hoovering” is actually a nice way of describing what actually happened. The process itself was at times violent. Anthropic spent millions of dollars buying physical books in bulk, then used industrial hydraulic cutting machines to slice off the bindings and spines, fed the loose pages into high-speed scanners, converted the images into machine-readable text files, and then threw the paper remains straight into the garbage. Some of those books stripped for parts were reportedly rare.
If that’s not a metaphor for what’s actually going on with writing today, I don’t know what is.
Not all hope is lost, however. Since AI is learning from human slop, we can–and should–do the hard work of writing well.
“Most of us should spend less energy trying to detect AI or not,” she writes. “Develop the judgment to know what not to hand over to the robots.”
Choose when not to take the shortcut. Protect the parts of yourself that deserve more of you. The parts where the struggle helps you…
- Think more clearly
- Develop taste
- Make something distinctive
- Feel deep joy, or
- Grow
That’s the resistance. It’s the only way through.
That… and for pete’s sake use em dashes. They are blameless.
Good points. And don’t surrender the rule of three, either.
Image via Pexels.
