Writers face a precarious future. As AI stories keep proliferating, we worry that our voices might be eventually drowned out. Will readers even be able to tell the difference between works that came from a machine versus a human?
As a long-time journalist, I couldn’t help but wonder if my own writing could be distinguished from the sea of synthetic verbiage sloshing around. When I heard about Pangram, an AI detection company, I was struck by its claims of high accuracy in telling human writing from AI-generated text. Co-founder Max Spero, a computer engineering scientist, cites a low error rate: only a 1 in 10,000 chance of human prose being mistaken for being AI-generated. Since Pangram’s launch in 2023, its detection tool has helped to ferret out signs of AI use in news articles, blogs, social media posts, academic papers, book manuscripts and other writing.
Intrigued, I tried Pangram on myself. I fed a couple of my recent writing samples into its search box. The result: “100% of this text was Human Written.” While Pangram doesn’t claim perfect accuracy, I was nonetheless relieved that my writing wasn’t prosaic enough to trigger a false positive.
I discovered Spero and his company on an Atlantic podcast titled, “Did a Human Write This?” Host Charlie Warzel, himself a writer, claimed that half of all online content is now created by AI, resulting in “forgettable, soulless pablum” that drives out quality human writing.
Spero was sympathetic. With critics deriding the wave of “AI slop,” he jokingly calls himself a slop janitor. “I don’t want to see AI polluting the Internet,” he said.
Recently, Pangram assisted with research from Stanford University and Imperial College, which found that 75% of respondents believed that an AI-dominated Internet would be less accurate. Furthermore, 83% believed that AI would flatten distinct, individual writing styles into a generic, uniform voice—a writing “monoculture,” Spero said. Some writers have even told him that they avoid talking to Claude too much for fear of adopting the chatbot’s writing style.
I squirmed as I listened to Spero. As I peered into the future, I wondered if anyone would still care about the time-honored craft of writing.
My work has been entirely my own. I don’t trust AI research unless I can verify it, and I avoid using AI in my writing. Call me a Luddite, but I was the first in my family to attend college. As an English major, I worked hard to learn syntax, organization, and the other building blocks of writing. After decades of practicing the craft as a journalist, I still enjoy the process of brainstorming, structuring a piece, and fine-tuning the thoughts and sentences.
In short, I like the creative challenge. Sure, it’s easy enough to give a prompt that conjures up a lengthy AI essay, but one would skip the process of creating, which is where the learning happens. Over the years, the practice of writing has made me a more disciplined and knowledgeable person.
For better or worse, my writing reflects me. I spend hours in front of the computer thinking, analyzing, making connections, exercising judgment, and plumbing for insights beyond the superficial. Being a writer helps me to make sense of the world, as it does for many writers that I’ve met throughout the years.
So, you might ask: Who cares? Don’t we have more dire things to ponder?
My reply: If you value creativity, please care.
I understand when other writers say that AI helps them with research or gives suggestions to improve their finished work. I get it, too, when workers faced with onerous or time-consuming writing tasks use AI to be more efficient. I’m not against the use of the technology. Many say that AI is here to stay, so we’ll need to adapt or get left behind.
But now that AI can draft everything from a text to a tome, will anyone—from a middle-schooler to a Substack scribe–still take pride in the ability to write? How many of us will continue to grapple with finding the perfect word or rewriting a sentence until it glides gracefully?
I can foresee a day when legions lose the discipline to birth an idea and see it through to completion. We might no longer have the courage to stare at a blank page. We’ll lose the doggedness to produce a first draft. Writing with AI is the path of least resistance. It’s infinitely faster, but it doesn’t push us to think to our full capacity.
Now, people are secretively using AI to write not only articles, but entire books, many of them hastily assembled. In March, a large publisher, Hachette Book Group, pulled the horror novel Shy Girl after rife online allegations that author Mia Ballard had used AI extensively, a charge she denied. Many Shy Girl readers had found the book repetitious and poorly written. When Spero caught wind of the controversy, he fed the entire novel into Pangram and posted on X that the novel was likely 78% AI-generated or -assisted.
It was a violation of trust. In cancelling the book, a spokeswoman told the New York Times, “Hachette remains committed to protecting original creative expression and storytelling,”
In confronting Ballard’s work, Spero and the online sleuths made it clear that they won’t accept AI-generated stories being passed off as the real thing. The upshot: Many of us still value soul, imagination and authenticity—our humanitas.
The most pressing question for me isn’t whether AI-generated works match the quality of human endeavors. Rather, I’m concerned about what happens when we outsource so much of our creativity. Wander through any major art museum and you’ll be in awe of the plethora of creative expression on display, among the most renowned: the Benin Bronzes of Africa, the Parthenon sculptures, Song Dynasty landscape paintings, Monet’s water lilies. Throughout history, humans have employed intuition, ingenuity and skill to hand down to future generations a vast artistic legacy. Going forward, will AI make us more creatively homogeneous?
People hate AI slop because it’s vague and predictable. In contrast, human creators are original, inventive, capable of deep thought and emotion—and we’re supremely weird. Our minds are not computers. We have a consciousness shaped by our histories: our joys and successes, loneliness and despair, hopes and yearnings. We generate art from the lives that we’ve lived.
Our bodies shape us, too. Our eyes see the beauty of the night sky, we smell fresh basil, we feel the comfort of a warm bath.
AI can’t do any of that. While it might produce works that seem unique and meaningful, it derives its creativity from training data and algorithms.
When humans reach the sublime, they conjure majesty.
The most breathtaking work that I ever read in college was John Milton’s Paradise Lost, written in the mid-1600s and praised as one of the greatest epic poems in English. I was astonished. Milton wrote the poem about humankind’s expulsion from the Garden of Eden after he had become completely blind. His will to create was so powerful that he composed and memorized the poem’s more than 10,000 lines and dictated them to scribes. His passionate voice and ear for language resound throughout the masterpiece.
In the shadow of AI, I fear the demise of transcendent writing from the likes of Milton. Maybe the audience for that kind of staggering achievement will disappear, if it hasn’t already. Instead of valuing unique writing styles, will we sleepwalk into a future of everyone sounding like Claude or ChatGPT?
What about our artwork, photography and songwriting? Will we descend into an artistic monoculture, too? Will we simply become less creative?
I hope that we’ll find ways to stay innovative. My own love affair with creativity goes way back, beginning with a fascination with words. I spent many childhood hours poring over the dictionary; I marveled at how words were spelled and loved reading about their origins. At school, I took quickly to writing.
Over the course of decades, the drive to create spilled into other areas: drawing and art, piano and drum lessons, and darkroom photography. The first time I dipped a piece of paper with an invisible image into a bath of film developer, I watched in awe as a photographic image floated forth magically. I bought a five-piece set of drums, happily banging away as I learned to read drum notation, which is quite different from reading piano music. I found delight in sketching the contours of a loved one’s face.
As an amateur, I will never profit commercially from any of my hobbies. Much of our creativity won’t be monetized. It won’t stave off hunger, pay the car insurance bill, or finance a roof repair. But artistic pursuits have made my interior world more opulent, which in turn has made me more sensitive to the wealth of ideas around me.
The jury is still out on how far AI technology can go in creating high-quality writing, art and songs. But in my mind, true creativity, whether in language, music or drama, flows from an awe-inspiring spark. German composer Johann Sebastian Bach possessed that vitality. He lived from 1685 to 1750, and his trailblazing, musical genius has echoed down through three centuries. Sting and many other modern-day rock stars have cited him as a major influence on their own musical journeys.
In our current state, AI-generated books, articles, songs, and videos might produce passable content. We may be entertained momentarily, but how much of it will endure, much in the same way that Bach’s emotionally resonant Cello Suite No. 1 still enchants us today?
Can AI execute the wild leaps and novel artistry that are the tell-tale signs of the endlessly inspired human mind?
Can AI originate a song that matches the rhythmic brilliance and distinctive vocal phrasing of the late singer Amy Winehouse? Will it ever write a complex, philosophical novel like The Brothers Karamazov?
Maybe eventually. But it saddens me to think that we might no longer aspire toward new inventive and artistic heights. In the age of machines, let us not cede our humanity and become creatively impoverished people.
Published on katherinekam.com, 2026