I haven’t thought much about my writing for the past few years. I haven’t had to. Most of my writing is limited to terse emails that I barely even read before sending, emoji-heavy Slack messages, and the occasional corporate-ese-filled memo.
But I’ve become nervous.
This nervousness showed up right around the same time I started using AI to help with my day-to-day writing. At first, the novelty was fun. I was saving time. It felt magic. But lately, as the kids say, I’m getting the ick.
It’s not that the AI content is unreadably bad. It’s that it sounds so averagely, milquetoast-edly human. And I can feel its beigeness rubbing off on real people. But the worst part is that it appeals to my inner slacker, drowning out any remaining creative impulses with whispers of “that’s good enough.”
Writing used to be an act of thought for me—slow, painful, and mildly pretentious, but full of intentionality. I graduated college two years before AI tool adoption hit escape velocity, so I still remember painstaking late nights fretting over a piece of writing. More than that, it’s a core foundation of my college and early career experience. Even as a not-particularly-linguistically-inclined social science major, my writing—my voice—was the defining product of my academic experience. I took a quiet pride in my ability to craft a coherent, readable narrative.
As a writer, your voice is your signature. The facts are the facts, but the way in which you convey them tells the reader something deeper about you: your beliefs, your desires, your perspective. In short, the human element.
Having a voice takes thought. And it takes pains. And I don’t like pains. But I think I’m starting to remember why the pain matters.
Because what happens when writing gets too easy?
Now I throw a few bullet points into ChatGPT and get back a full essay. The temptation is constant. In the same way I instinctively reach for my calculator app when faced with a math problem that a fifth-grader could solve, I now find myself drifting toward AI whenever I sit down to write. Even drafting out this essay, I felt the pull to “just paste this into ChatGPT and see what it gives you.” I had to slap my own hand away out of embarrassment.
My concern is what happens when a critical mass of people decide to take the easy route. And who would blame them! Writing is a means to an end for most of us. A way to convince a boss, charm a potential employer, please your partner, or otherwise check a box. It’s not the act of writing that counts, it’s the thought underneath, right?
The less I and those around me write “organically”, the more I’m convinced otherwise. Writing is more than a mechanism to express our thoughts. It is a tool in itself to shape, refine and inject personality into those thoughts. As every entrepreneur and self-described creative will tell you, the original idea matters—but what you do with it matters more. Writing is a forcing function to “do” something with an idea. To test, prod, examine, and poke holes in an idea until a deeper truth might be revealed.
I often think about Oscar Wilde’s searing critique of his former lover’s “failure to play gracefully with ideas.” In Wilde’s eyes, the enemy of bohemian thought and creativity was what he termed a “violence of opinion,” or loose opinions strongly held. But in a world of prose on demand, we’re all playing increasingly less gracefully with ideas. A muscle atrophies when unused. I worry that our writing voices—and the graceful ideas that spring from them—are quietly wilting away.
More importantly, I worry that LLMs are creating a twist on Wilde’s slur: a violence of un-opinion. In our haste to avoid the pains of “thought through writing,” we’re rattling out half-baked ideas and hoping that an LLM can create order out of the noise. And it always does. At least on the surface. But order doesn’t equate to meaning, let alone originality.
The issue lies at the heart of LLMs. AI as we know it today is a product of means and modes. Simplistically, the language of these machines is pieced together by calculating what the most likely next word in a string might be. As a result, true originality and creativity are structurally challenging. Sure, AI will answer any question with a plausible, human-esque response. But as Robin Williams’ character said, I'll bet you can't tell me what it smells like in the Sistine Chapel.
The critical missing component isn’t that AI doesn’t (yet) have a sense of smell, but more that any AI-generated description of a human moment is merely a simulation. Don’t get me wrong: ChatGPT will absolutely tell you what the Sistine Chapel smells like. But the description it provides—however soulful—is in effect the averaged sum of thousands of written experiences, not an individual experience. AI does not have to reach deep for its own unique truth. We humans still have a monopoly on original feelings and we do ourselves a disservice by relinquishing that ownership in exchange for an easy answer.
As AI continues to make writing easier—and it will—nearly everyone will be lured onto the easy route. Either by choice or by force. Choice, because the pains of writing feel unnecessary to many of us. Force, because keeping up with AI-enabled peers may eventually require it. As a result, personal tone, voice, and truly original thoughts will slowly but surely transform from a necessity to something akin to an art. Something rare and impractical.
Eventually only two groups will still endure the pains to write with true organic authenticity: hobbyists and artisans. Notably, these artisans may spring up in surprisingly un-artistic places. Industries like venture capital and frontier technology where contrarian originality is explicitly valued are already becoming a bastion of writers who still take pains
But outside of these small corners, AI is leading us into a world where blogs, student essays, corporate memos, and (eventually) newspapers and magazines are filled with readable yet hollow prose.
I worry that this creates an existential risk: fewer people practicing slow, introspective thought. A flattening of the language and the emergence of a universal voice. Less originality.
The real societal value of a culture of writing is not (just) communication, it's the original thought, creativity, and often-painful idea refinement prompted by the process of writing. The beautiful part of writing is that it can be ugly and still have a profound effect on the writer themself.
I don’t want to lose the beautiful part of writing—no matter how ugly it can be. So I choose the inefficient, old fashioned and often painful process of writing the [email, birthday card, blog post, cover letter, corporate memo] myself. At least until I get busy again.