If You've Ever Used AI To Write, Don't Read This

Daylight is fading over the Amsterdam canal. Raindrops join the water and make the pavement glimmer. A woman holding an umbrella walks up the stone stairs leading to the monumental front door of the 16th-century building. She pulls the doorbell and a short time later the door opens. Some quick nods. The bearded man in his fifties closes the door behind her.

They enter a large room that looks the same as when the house was first built. The only elements out of place: an oversized screen with a keyboard in front of it on a low antique table. Facing the screen is an empty chair. Already in the room a spectacled man in his thirties. The three gather around a stand. They have done this before.

The woman pulls a well-worn copy of Pride and Prejudice from her purse, lays it on the stand, puts her left hand on top of it and raises her right hand. The bearded man in the role of the officiant spells out the requirements and the woman nods and confirms. Next, the spectacled man lays his copy of Moby Dick on the stand and is sworn in as well.

The bearded man leaves the room and the two witnesses sit down in two chairs behind the empty chair in front of the screen. The door opens and the bearded man leads the author towards the chair in front of the screen. He begins to write. The witnesses are there to observe and testify that no AI was used during the entire session.

If you insist on reading purely human-created prose then what you see in the previous scene is how we may need to do it. Some premium books will bear the COP label: Certified Organic Prose.

In 2026 AI-generated text has already become mostly undetectable. Sure, an entire piece straight from the AI can be relatively reliably detected, but add a few modifications here and there or run it through a “humanizer” tool and all bets are off.

More to the point: a lot of this rests on the underlying assumption that the final phrasing and word choice are the main creative process. I see this differently. Let’s define four separate stages in the creative writing process:

1. The spark: initial idea, choice of subject and style

2. Research: what exists, what does the data say (in case of non-fiction)

3. Outlining: what to include, how to build the arc

4. Drafting: writing the text

The spark starts with the human but AI can help as a sounding board and by providing ideas. Isn’t this first stage more important creatively than the final rendering of the language? Yet, we will never be able to detect if AI has helped at this stage, not even if we would go through the trouble depicted in the opening scene.

As for the second stage, research, who could possibly have a problem with that? No, this is not one of the more creative steps, but if you can have a detailed report using AI about any subject in ten minutes, it does make a difference. To cobble together a similar amount of information used to take a day using search. In an even earlier context it would mean a week in the library.

The third stage, outlining is in my opinion from a creativity perspective the most important one. This is where you construct the frame and make important curation decisions. Personally I like using AI in this stage as a sounding board. A back and forth can help to quickly get clarity about what might and might not work. Apparently I am in good company. To the shock of many, Olga Tokarczuk the 2018 Nobel literature laureate said at the Impact 26 conference in Poznań: “Often I just ask the machine, ‘darling, how could we develop this beautifully?’“ Link. The literary establishment did not like that at all and gave her a hard time about it. She tried to backtrack.

Finally, the actual words are of course important.

I mentioned in an earlier post that given AI’s rapidly increasing abilities it would be only a matter of time before it would surpass human authors. Let me add some perspective to that. Creative writing, above a certain level, is not something that can neatly be measured along a linear scale. The appreciation becomes as much of a creative act as the creation.

So where are we with creative writing? At the bottom rungs AI has already almost completely taken over. Basic journalism, product descriptions, YouTube voice overs etc. are mostly AI generated. Is that a bad thing? I don’t think so, because in many cases it’s an improvement. Initially, when I recognized the AI prose tics, it would make me click away from YouTube videos. Recently I noticed that, tics and all, I was interpreting AI-generated as a base quality level. At least I could expect some coherence.

A pattern we’ve seen with many technologies is that initially they were seen as a form of cheating. Some examples are: word-processing with its spelling and grammar check, photography and graphic design using a computer. For most new technologies the outrage eventually died down and people used it and moved on. Writing with AI is a little different because we can’t really tell the origin in the end.

Personally I use AI in the first three stages and not the final one. Not that I would have any moral issues with doing so. This blog is mostly about AI, don’t pretend to be shocked if I did that. At this stage getting the words exactly how I want them is just a lot more trouble with AI compared to just going the brain-finger-keyboard route. This may very well stay that way, who knows.

The appreciation of any art form has a lot to do with what people believe about how it was created. Did the artist only have to enter a prompt to get a drawing? Nothing special. Did he have to work his fingers to the bone mixing pigments and work for months to get the light just right on the oil-on-canvas rendition? Genius!

On May 13 someone posted this to X:
”i just generated an image in the style of a Monet painting using AI
please describe, in as much detail as possible, what makes this inferior to a real Monet painting”

Instead of posting an AI generated “Monet” they posted a real one. It was interesting to see how hundreds of commenters explained in detail why the image was inferior to a real Monet.

I expect writing with AI at any stage to join word processing and similar technologies. Everyone will understand that you may or may not have used AI to come up with a text. It will raise the bottom. It will facilitate laziness and who knows, it might overall give us more interesting things to read. Nobody will care. Except the people in the house on the canal in Amsterdam.