Artificial intelligence drafting my story? over my dead body

Sports writing legend Red Smith once said that writing a column is easy: “All you do is sit at a typewriter and bleed.” By 2026, however, there’s no need for blood. All you have to do is sit down in front of your laptop and let Claude or ChatGPT write the story for you.

This seems to be the conclusion of a series of recent press reports. Last month, my colleague Maxwell Zeff wrote an article about writers unapologetically produced At least some of their prose was written by uncredited AI collaborators. The star of his piece is tech journalist Alex Heath, who says he often lets AI write drafts based on his notes, interview transcripts and emails. That same week, the Wall Street Journal reported Fortune reporter Nick Lichtenberg explained to the newspaper that he relies heavily on artificial intelligence to do his job. Since July, he has written 600 stories; on one day in February this year, he had seven bylines.

I have had trouble sleeping since reading these reports (which were thankfully produced by human hands). Until recently, the use of large language models to actually create business prose was thought to be prohibitive. many publications, Includes Wiredhas strict guidelines for AI-generated text. We also don’t use it for editing, which is less worrisome than several of the other practices cited in Zeff’s column, but is still troublesome. The book publishing world tries to protect itself from the flood of self-published books but still regulates its catalogues. Hachette Book Group recently withdraw A novel that clearly relies too much on the results of an LLM. But as model-generated prose becomes increasingly indistinguishable from human output, the convenience and cost savings of using artificial intelligence to do the arduous task of writing may filter into the mainstream. The walls began to collapse.

As one might expect, a lot of people are unhappy with this development, especially people like me who have blood dripping from their keyboards. But the subject of the story doesn’t hold back. It’s like they feel like the future is on their side. When I contacted Heath (whose work I respect), he confirmed he was getting pushback but shrugged it off. “I see artificial intelligence as a tool,” he said. “I don’t think it replaced anything — the only thing it replaced was the drudgery that I didn’t want to do.”

Of course, for people like me, the hard work of writing is a critical aspect of the entire endeavor, enabling myself to communicate effectively and clearly. Heath believes he does connect with readers through his writing—he says he’s trained his artificial intelligence to sound like him, and his substacks include tidbits he personally writes about what he’s doing. On the other hand, he told me that since he spoke with Zeev, he’s written several columns almost “all at once.” “When I say one-time, I mean I barely have to do anything,” he said. But Heath disputed the idea that letting an artificial intelligence write prose for him meant he was bypassing the thought process that many thought was only possible through actual writing. “I just wanted to get away from that very confusing, painful, zero-to-one blank page,” he said.

The Fortune writer who was the subject of the Wall Street Journal article was also affected, not only by the public but also by his friends and colleagues. "I experience tension in intimate and personal relationships," Lichtenberg admits Interview with Reuters Institute for Journalism. In an email, Fortune editor-in-chief Alyson Shontell tried to distance me from the idea that artificial intelligence was taking over the jobs of reporters under her leadership. “Importantly,[Lichtenberg]did not use it as a substitute for writing,” she writes. “His stories are aided by AI, not written by AI. He is undertaking extensive and ambitious reporting, analysis and revision that is highly original.”