What human writers must learn from AI

AI learned from us. Now we need to learn from it.

The Nightmare, oil on canvas by Henry Fuseli, 1781

I remember the first time I felt like AI was a weight on my chest.

Black. Dark. Like I couldn’t breathe.

Like the painting by Fuseli I used on this piece. A nightmare, he called it. He’d been painting for years but no one paid attention until that one. People looked at it and understood instantly and I still remember the first time AI made me feel that way.

When ChatGPT first launched I had no idea how big it would get. A hundred million weekly users, that’s how big they are now. That’s just crazy to me.

Honestly, I mostly ignored it. I’d log into a free account once in a while to ask it to find historical information or a movie title I couldn’t remember if Google was sucking. And I’d always ask for credible sources because this thing lies its face off sometimes.

I’d never ask AI to write for me any more than I’d ask a robot to go for a walk in the woods for me. I love writing, why would I want to have a tool do it for me? Finding the words to express what I’m thinking or feeling — I love doing that. It’s a joy.

But one day?

One day a writer on Medium posted to say hurray, she’d made ten thousand dollars in one month. She posted a screencap of her earnings and I know you can fake those, but I believed her. I saw the responses to her posts. The claps and comments.

Her posts were all AI.

And they weren’t just a little bit of AI “help” with editing. Plug her “writing” into five different AI detection programs and they all came back with scores over 70%. It wasn’t editing. It was AI prompted and maybe tweak a bit here or there. You know?

Incidentally, if you know who I’m talking about, please don’t say the name. It’s not about who and I don’t want to devolve into that. It’s just about what’s happening.

She was posting every day. Thirty, forty posts a month.

I stared at the screen thinking how much earning ten thousand dollars in a month for writing would change my life and my options and I just wanted to cry.

Because I knew. I can’t keep up with that volume. I can’t. Not humanly possible.

I’m doing my best. Writing as much as I can, but I have clients. Because bills never stop and they don’t care if it’s a good or bad month. They want their money.

On a good month I can do a couple of posts a week.

Editing and editing to get the words right. To earn what she was earning, I’d need my measly half a dozen posts per month to earn twelve or fifteen hundred each. Every time. And the fact is, no one hits it out of the park every time like that.

But she didn’t even need to. She just made up for it in volume. Yay, AI, right?

I remember staring at that post and then slowly sliding the mouse upwards and closing every last screen on my computer. Pushing my chair back.

Putting on my shoes. Walking out the door and locking it behind me.

Ten thousand dollars a month and I can’t compete. It was bigger than just her. Because I knew it wouldn’t be just her. There would be more like her.

But come, the forest is calling.

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The second time I felt AI weighing heavy on my chest was when Substack published their AI report. To see how people are using AI here, they reviewed around two thousand Substacks. 70% of them are paid and roughly half are AI.

I read that and thought wow. People are paying for AI generated posts.

Felt a lot like that day at Medium all over again.

Then I ran across a post with forty thousand hearts and it read like AI to me so I ran it through several AI detectors. They all gave it varying scores over 80%.

I mentioned that in a post and someone said yeah, but the hearts are probably mostly bots. Maybe. But the 500+ comments aren’t. Sure, there’s a few AI comments. You can spot those real easy. But the five hundred comments are mostly people who resonated with the sentiment of the piece.

Hello AI, we meet again. Except on Substack.

Every day I see comments about AI on Notes. Some writer will post that AI is slop or cheating. They always get a lot of engagement and of course they do because people struggling to learn the craft of writing are upset by the rise in AI generated posts.

A while ago, I saw an ugly battle between two writers play out on Notes.

One writer called out another for using AI. Saying her posts are all AI, don’t read that garbage. Why y’all paying to support someone who is basically cheating? But she didn’t just mention the name, she linked to it. Tagged the writer. Like a taunt.

Outing her in public for using AI.

The AI writer posted back to lol, you’re just jealous of the response I get. Maybe you should learn to write better and you’ll get the same response I do. Ouch.

Utter mayhem ensued. People duking it out, taking sides.

And the AI writer kept flaunting her numbers. Saying hey, it works.

Wired wrote about Substack writers using AI and quoted Hamish McKenzie, who described the generative AI boom as a change writers need to confront, regardless of their personal views: “Whether you’re for or against this development ultimately doesn’t matter. It’s happening,” he said.

That’s the world we’re writing in.

On Medium, AI writing takes directly out of the pocket of writers because there’s a pile of cash allotted to pay writers and every dollar paid to an AI generated post affects people who spent hours writing a post.

But it’s here, too. Except here it’s views.

Here, it’s AI generated posts getting bumped in the feeds while we struggle for views. Some days I can ignore it. Other days, it weighs heavier.

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Can I show you something? Because I think there’s something to be learned here.

Here’s a prompt I gave ChatGPT:

I’m writing an essay on feeling frustrated and afraid, bleak and depressed and trying to overcome that feeling. Please write a good opening, in first person

Here’s the reply.

Some mornings I wake up exhausted, as if I fought a battle in my sleep and lost. The air feels heavier than it should and every thought drags. I keep telling myself to move, to try, to believe motion will save me—but some days hope is a weight.
(written by ChatGPT)

As an editor, I could critique that. The air feels heavier? No. My heart does. And what the hell does “every thought drags” mean? My thoughts don’t drag. They’re bleak. I’d edit that to say my heart is heavy and my thoughts are bleak. It would read stronger. Which is what a lot of AI writers do, right? Generate a post, then tweak it.

Here’s another one:

The prompt: Write a story about a woman who gets lost in the forest and realizes the forest is a metaphor for her fears, for how much she’s afraid of. Write in first person...

Look at this…

I tightened the straps of my hiking pack and took a deep breath. The forest loomed ahead, the trees clawing the sky. This was supposed to be a simple hike — just a few hours to clear my mind. But as I stepped onto the trail, a strange unease prickled the back of my neck.

The day started beautifully. Sunlight dappled the forest floor, and birds sang like a well-rehearsed choir. I felt calm at first, letting the rhythm of my steps drown out the noise in my head. But somewhere along the way, I must have taken a wrong turn. Familiar markers vanished, and the trail seemed to dissolve into wilderness.

I kept walking, telling myself it would be fine, but my chest tightened with each step. The forest grew darker as the sun dipped behind the trees. Shadows stretched long and strange, and the cheerful chirps of birds were replaced by rustling in the underbrush. My throat felt dry, and I tried calling out, but …

I didn’t include the whole story because it’s over 500 words.

But still. Tell me that’s slop.

Because that’s what we say, isn’t it? AI is slop. AI is crap, blah, blah and it makes me a little crazy when I hear people say that because AI was trained on John Grisham and George R.R. Martin. On Margaret Atwood and Jodi Picoult. On David Baldacci and Sarah Silverman. On writers who are stronger writers than many of us.

Yes, AI was trained on stolen work. Reams of it. Millions of published books that were pirated. Millions of stories from newspapers and magazines. Stolen without consent from the writer or compensation. Words written by powerful and beloved writers.

I wrote a post about Kurt Vonnegut’s first rule of writing and it’s crawled up into my top ten posts. His first rule of writing is really simple. Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.

That’s what powerful writers do really well.

It’s also what AI does really well.

People are reading AI not because it’s AI but because it’s easy to read.

But there is one downside to AI and it’s that after you read enough of it, you can spot it. Not by words it uses too frequently and not by em dashes or any of that nonsense. It’s that there’s a surface profundity to it. It’s trying to be deep, but it’s not.

It sounds like it’s saying something, but after a while, you start to realize it’s all kind of surface-y. It’s not really digging in. Just scraping the surface of human emotion and experience and what else can it do when it has no human experience?

The people AI learned from didn’t use AI. That’s worth remembering.

They had actual human experiences.

AI can never do that.

We will never be able to keep up with the volume AI writers can churn out. But if we can look at AI generated writing and learn from the pace and the simplicity people are responding to, and apply that to our human experiences, I do think we can come out on top. Because we have depth that AI can never have. Maybe there’s hope in that.

Love to know what you think...

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