But not the way you think.
The biggest threat isn’t that people are using AI to write for them. It’s that people are intentionally writing worse to prove they didn’t.
No punctuation. No capitalization. Sentence fragments everywhere. Dropping em dashes because AI uses them. I’ve done that one myself. The Mac keyboard gives you a proper typeset em dash and I’ve been using it for as long as I can remember. Now I avoid it because someone might think a machine wrote my sentence.
That’s not a win. That’s a concession.
I’ve been writing since grade school. Creative writing courses through high school and college. Owned an agency for twenty years. Written for books, magazines, video scripts, and more copy than I care to remember. I have two copies of Strunk and White’s Elements of Style with cracked spines and worn pages from actual use.
I also use AI regularly. I’ve let it write for me on a couple of occasions and I’ve been honest about that. It wasn’t my best moment.
But I’m not going to unlearn the craft to perform authenticity.
We are watching communicators voluntarily abandon the tools of good communication because the tools got associated with a machine. We’re not being forced to write worse. We’re choosing to. And somehow that’s become acceptable.
The answer to “AI writes like this” is not “then I’ll write like I don’t care.” The answer is to write something a machine can’t. Something with lived experience behind it, a specific point of view, and the kind of craft that only comes from doing the reps.
Here’s where I draw the line.
I use AI to gather ideas, test structure, and pressure-test arguments. But the voice is mine. The final draft is mine. The choices about what to say, how to say it, and what to leave out are mine. I don’t dumb down the craft to prove I’m human. I just do the work.
If you’ve spent years learning how to write well, don’t unlearn it because a machine got decent at faking it. That’s not how you stay human. That’s how you let the machine win twice.
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