The explosion of em dashes and negation (“it’s not X, it’s Y”) in LinkedIn posts and college essays over the past few years has an obvious culprit, and it rhymes with “fartificial fintelligence.” But rather than relying on pedantic ire, Sam Kriss sets out to take the measure of AI writing’s sundry and various shortcomings. Required reading for the next time someone tells you that “no, it’s actually quite good!” Good for data analysis, sure. Good for compelling prose? Maybe not quite.
What nobody really anticipated was that inhuman machines generating text strings through essentially stochastic recombination might be funny. But GPT had a strange, brilliant, impressively deadpan sense of humor. It had a habit of breaking off midway through a response and generating something en…
The explosion of em dashes and negation (“it’s not X, it’s Y”) in LinkedIn posts and college essays over the past few years has an obvious culprit, and it rhymes with “fartificial fintelligence.” But rather than relying on pedantic ire, Sam Kriss sets out to take the measure of AI writing’s sundry and various shortcomings. Required reading for the next time someone tells you that “no, it’s actually quite good!” Good for data analysis, sure. Good for compelling prose? Maybe not quite.
What nobody really anticipated was that inhuman machines generating text strings through essentially stochastic recombination might be funny. But GPT had a strange, brilliant, impressively deadpan sense of humor. It had a habit of breaking off midway through a response and generating something entirely different. . . . When I tried to generate some more newspaper headlines, they included “A Gun Is Out There,” “We Have No Solution” and “Spiders Are Getting Smarter, and So, So Loud.”
I ended up sinking several months into an attempt to write a novel with the thing. It insisted that chapters should have titles like “Another Mountain That Is Very Surprising,” “The Wetness of the Potatoes” or “New and Ugly Injuries to the Brain.” The novel itself was, naturally, titled “Bonkers From My Sleeve.” There was a recurring character called the Birthday Skeletal Oddity. For a moment, it was possible to imagine that the coming age of A.I.-generated text might actually be a lot of fun.
More on writing (human and otherwise)
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The Autocrat of English Usage
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“Henry W. Fowler believed he knew how sentences should read—and his judgments have shaped The New Yorker’s style for a century.”
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Maggie Millner | The Yale Review | September 2, 2025 | 3,420 words
“Shame seemed like an obstacle to appreciating the poet. Instead, it became the key to understanding her work.”
Demanding Pleasures
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“On the art of observation.”
What Happened When I Tried to Replace Myself with ChatGPT in My English Classroom
Piers Gelly | Literary Hub | July 28, 2025 | 5,911 words
“We would look at the evidence, and at the end of the semester, they would decide by vote whether A.I. could replace me.”
What Happens After A.I. Destroys College Writing?
Hua Hsu | The New Yorker | June 30, 2025 | 6,207 words
“The demise of the English paper will end a long intellectual tradition, but it’s also an opportunity to reëxamine the purpose of higher education.”