Artificial intelligence in crafting my stories? Over my dead body

Sportswriting legend Red Smith once said that writing a column was easy: “All you do is sit down at your typewriter and bleed.” But in 2026, there will be no need for blood. All you have to do is sit in front of your laptop and ask Claude or ChatGPT to write the story for you.

This seems to be the conclusion from a host of reports coming out of the press front recently. Last month, my colleague Maxwell Ziff wrote about writers who… Unapologetically generating At least some of their prose is via unspecified AI collaborators. The star of his piece was Alex Heath, a technology reporter who said he routinely asks AI to write drafts based on his notes, interview transcripts, and emails. That same week, the Wall Street Journal profiled it Luck reporter Nick Lichtenberg, who explained to the newspaper that he relies heavily on artificial intelligence to do his work. He has written 600 stories since July. One day last February, he had seven bylines.

Since reading these reports, which were thankfully made by human hands, I have had difficulty sleeping. Until recently, the consensus was that using large language models to create commercial prose was prohibited. many publications, Including wiredhas strict guidelines against AI-generated text. We don’t use it for editing either, which is less worrisome, though it’s still a practice as annoying as many of the others mentioned in Ziff’s column. The book publishing world, trying to protect itself from an avalanche of self-published books, still polices its catalogue; Hachette Book Collection recently to retreat A novel that seems to have relied too much on the output of an LLM. But as models turn into prose that becomes increasingly difficult to distinguish from human output, the convenience and cost savings of using AI for the difficult task of writing threaten to seep into the mainstream. The walls started collapsing.

As one might expect, many people were not happy to read about this development, especially those with blood dripping from their keyboards like me. But the themes of the stories don’t hold back. It is as if they feel that the future is in their favor. When I called Heath – whose work I respect – he confirmed that he had been criticized but shrugged it off. “I see AI as a tool,” he says. “I don’t see it replacing anything, the only thing it replaced was hard work which I didn’t want to do anyway.”

Of course, the hard work of writing, for people like me, is a crucial aspect of the whole effort, as one brings oneself to the task of communicating effectively and clearly. Heath believes he connects with readers through his writing, says he has trained his own AI to look like him, and includes his subset personally written anecdotes about what he’s up to. On the other hand, he told me that since he talked to Ziff, he’s almost done a “one-shot” at two of his columns. “When I say one hit, I mean I didn’t need to do almost anything,” he says. But Heath disputes the idea that allowing an AI to write prose for him means it has bypassed the thought process that many believe can only happen through actual writing. “I’m just getting rid of that messy, very painful, zero-to-one blank page,” he says.

The Fortune magazine writer who was the subject of the magazine’s article also suffered repercussions, not only from the public, but from his friends and colleagues as well. “I feel tension in my personal and close relationships.” Lichtenberg admitted In an interview with the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism. In an email, Alison Shontel, Fortune’s editor-in-chief, tried to talk me out of the idea of ​​artificial intelligence taking over reporters’ jobs under her watch. “It is important that (Lichtenberg) does not use it as a substitute for writing,” she wrote. “His stories are AI-powered versus AI-written. He still does a lot of the ambitious reporting and analysis and reworking that he does and it’s very original.”