Mastery of banal style is losing its usefulness – but language is more powerful than ever. It’s up to the writer to do what machines can’t
I recently heard an exchange at a playground that should worry the executives at AI companies more than any analyst’s prediction of a bubble. A boy and a girl, maybe 10 years old, were fighting. “That’s AI! That’s AI!” the girl was shouting. What she meant was that the boy was indulging a new and particular breed of nonsense: language that sounds meaningful but has no connection to reality. The children have figured the new world out quickly, as they do.
Artificial intelligence is here to stay, neither as an apocalypse nor as the solution to all life’s problems, but as a disruptive tool. The recent scandal over Shy Girl, the novel by Mia Ballard, was doubly revealing. Hachette cancelled its publication amid claims it was reliant on AI generation (Ballard has said that an acquaintance who edited the self-published version used AI, not her). But the book was originally self-published. Apparently readers and editors didn’t mind until the use of AI was pointed out to them.
Stephen Marche lives in Toronto and is the author of The Next Civil War and On Writing and Failure
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