Four Years Into Forever
AI, anti-AI writing, and the tyranny of the immediate
Dear Living Dark reader,
Across journalism, criticism, creative writing, and especially among compulsive LinkedIn posters, writers are converging on a set of choices that implicitly resist the trappings of AI-generated prose.
—Emma Madden, “More Typos, Fewer Em Dashes: Writers Are Creating an Anti-AI ‘Literary Counterculture,’” WIRED, July 29, 2026
Is anybody noticing how thoroughly this is caught up in the tyranny of the immediate? We’re not even four years into the mass-public era of generative AI, for God’s sake. The present rush was touched off when OpenAI released ChatGPT to the general public in November 2022. And we’re already thinking we need to fundamentally change how we write because of it?
We’ve been writing for thousands of years. Even our contemporary mass-media and publishing culture, young as it is, has roots reaching back a couple of centuries. But some of us are acting as if a technology that has only just been sprung upon us, one so young that we don’t even know what it is yet or what its lasting cultural meaning will be, has already changed the whole game. And we’re turning that claim into a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Certainly, AI has already changed some of the conditions of writing, both the way we produce it and the way we judge it. And if it sends us back as writers to cultivate our voices and idiosyncrasy more deliberately—something Madden’s article touches on (see below)—then some good may come of that. But this isn’t the same as assuming a brand-new technology has the authority to redefine what human writing ought to sound like in reactive response to it. (Side note: These are among the questions I’m currently exploring in The Serious Writer’s Guide to Using AI Without Losing Your Soul, a project that I’m deeply into developing, and that’s currently the length of a short book. I hope to have more to share from it soon.)
People throw around the term “AI psychosis” to refer to cases of chatbot-induced delusion, and, more loosely, to episodes such as Richard Dawkins forthrightly announcing his conviction that Claude is conscious and treating a particular instance of it as a genuine friend. He received significant backlash over this (though his actual position was a bit more measured than many of his mocking critics acknowledged or allowed for). Maybe somebody needs to point out that another kind of AI psychosis is to let the technology’s admittedly amazing, confounding, and troubling capabilities convince us that it has been around for longer than the cultural equivalent of five seconds, and that we therefore need to Do Everything Differently.
After a few decades of psychological and cultural entrainment by social media, digital technology, and the 24/7 news cycle, we live in the delusion of an eternal present, Douglas Rushkoff’s “present shock,” the sense that the present cultural moment is a real-time, all-encompassing “now” that envelops everything, so that nothing has ever been or could ever be different. Our instantaneous assumption that all bets are off because of AI is a reflection and manifestation of this disorder.
That’s one reason I appreciate the sanity of Madden’s conclusion, which peers past this presentist position. Madden quotes an observation by Clickhole writer Jessye McGarry that gestures beyond the current solipsistic horizon:
But as AI keeps pace with human writing, potentially being trained on a corpus of anti-AI writing styles as they develop, it could soon necessitate the invention of an anti-anti-anti-AI style. “Whatever cosmetic counterstyle is created in response to AI, AI could mimic,” says McGarry. “The only true counterstyle is good writing.”
Exactly. The technology is new, but our task and calling as writers isn’t.
Warm regards,
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On the deeper forces in the creative life:
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As usual, brilliant observations and plenty of food for thought. I'll be reading it again!
The only antidote to machine-made art is more human-made art and I think we'd be better served as a species to just get on with that instead of all the hand-wringing and teeth-gnashing. Though that could be me opting for the ostrich option.
As for changing how we write to seem less AI-ish, well, you'll have to pry the em dash out of my cold, dead hands. :)
"But some of us are acting as if a technology that has only just been sprung upon us, one so young that we don’t even know what it is yet or what its lasting cultural meaning will be, has already changed the whole game."
For 3000 years, a piece of writing was evidence of human thought, and the fluency of that writing was a loose proxy for the quality (or at least degree) of thought that went into it. For the most part, good writing meant there was a mind behind the scenes that had done a lot of work.
AI broke writing as proof-of-thought.