Is AI writing, any writing at all?

The act of writing is beautiful.

The pull of AI is magnetic.

Avoid AI and become a literary dinosaur. Accept it and you betray Nabokov and Shakespeare and Saunders and Murakami.

I spar with my co-founder. No fisticuffs, this is a verbal spat, slack messages threaded thirty levels deep.

At root: I've authored a note to a major partner using AI. It's crafted with the brilliance of all the greatest tech executives; it bristles with the combined learning from every business letter written, ever.

My co-founder fumes and rages. He beleaguers me: "It reads like AI slop," as if reminding me that guesswork and human imperfection is a selling point. We'll be found out as fake prophets. Cads. Simpletons.

They'll ask their own AI if our letter was written by our own AI. My-cofounder prompts AI whether our AI sounds too much like AI.

I remind him that not using AI to write business prose is a boomer's errand. It's demanding typewriter ribbon in an era of word processors; an inkwell in an age of ballpoints.

_{(I then ask my AI to remove all of the em dashes and toss in a minimal typo, to throw their AI off the scent.)}

Creatives have always ridden uphill against transformation. Dylan was heckled for going electric. DJs weren't musicians because they didn't strum instruments.

Suno doesn't make real songs because prompts are ghosts in a machine.

AI seduces. It's a serpent of shortcuts, licking at my fingertips. Slowly and rarely; then sometimes and now almost always, I offer a finished piece into the black maw that is AI.

Proofread only, I plead. Do not rewrite. I'm given grammatical fixes. It identifies errors in spelling and punctuation, and consistency of tenses.

I'm offered solutions that have the strength of 1,000 writing gorillas wrestling with 1,000 editorial lions.

AI is mostly brilliant. It suggests which pieces miss the mark on the ending. It counsels on polish for sentence rhythm, tone, readability. It completes ideas and strengthens weak transitions. I hope for it to be wrong, but mostly, it's perfectly right.

I look away, ashamed.

Butman, a human, was a co-conspirator of words, a mentor without judgment. We traded pages. We debated paragraphs. Butman has left this astral plane.

My college professor, Pulitzer-winner Steven Millhauser (also human), marked stories by hand with a real pencil in real red color.

Neither were available at 2:13 AM.

AI doesn't skip words or passages.

It doesn't get tired.

It starts to know my voice better than I know my own reflection. It respects my writing peccadillos.

It sees the bespectacled, nerdy, I-write-for-myself writer I aim to be.

I fear the imminent arrival of an AI-developed Digital Writing Twin, banging at the front door in the pitch black of night.

My Digital Writing Twin will be imbued with the history of all my words, of every literary choice, of every influence. It connects themes, like electricity powering stringed lights between lampposts.

My Digital Writing Twin will be better than I ever was. The real me is flawed; the AI reflection will be perfect.

I suspect that when I die, my Digital Writing Twin will carry on, publishing new stories into infinity, as if filling Borges's Library of Babel.

Then my Digital Twin’s stories will be distributed to a never-ending army of AI Agents who will read every one (unlike humans); they'll send them to AI Marketing Agents to share, AI Critic Agents can comment, so Studio AI Agents can adapt them into films while Space AI Agents beam them toward distant planets until AI Waste Agents throw them into digital waste bins, crumpled into balls of whatever fake paper all of AI will be writing on by then.