Friends Don't Let Friends Write with AI
We're better than our computers!
Hi friends,
So I wasn’t going to write this post. I’ve had it in my head for a while now, but haven’t wanted to send it because it goes against my writing ethos, which is modeled on Amy Poehler’s (excellent) parenting advice: “Good for you! Not for me!” In a world where people have VERY STRONG OPINIONS about writing and productivity systems and what works, I remain something of a cheerful pragmatist: if it works for you, amazing! If not, that’s cool too! Either way, put some words on the page!
In conversations with clients, though, questions about ChatGPT has started to slip in…“I hear people are trying ChatGPT to write their intros…” “Do you think ChatGPT might help me figure out how to…” So yeah, people are using ChatGPT (and co) to do their work. And I get it. We’re busy. Writing is freaking hard. And a lot of writing is freaking tedious. If LLMs made people better writers, I’d be into it (probably). The problem is…it kinda sucks.
My discomfort
I lurk in a lot of editor channels on social media, and this week, two different editors told a version of this story: they were hired to proofread, were checking references, noticed that not a single reference actually existed in the real world…because the entire paper was written by ChatGPT, which hallucinated an entire works cited section.
I’ve also heard from acquisition editors that they’ve been rejecting books and articles from well-known, well-published authors because there is a lack of depth in what they’re submitting. And they think ChatGPT is to blame.
And I there are terrifying artifacts of the world that generative AI seems to produce (here, here, here, here).
What AI loses
In my normal editing life, when people send me stuff to read, I often find that early drafts are like balls of yarn that have gotten slightly tangled. There are typos, and rough sentences, and ideas that are slightly out of order. I need to worry it around in my brain for a while. Figure out where the start is, keep following that thread, back up when I hit a snag, sometimes go back to the beginning, but at the end I can almost always smoothen the yarn out so I can see what it’s meant to be, and then show my clients how to knit it into something awesome. I love this process (And it works! My clients get stuff published in the fanciest of places all the time!)
But lately I’ve been fielding a second type of writing (not from academics yet! I’m not vaguebooking about any of you lovely readers!) which feels…like an over-polished pond of ice. You glance at it and think “huh, why did they hire an editor? This is really smooth.” And then you try to dig in, and keep just hitting that glassy surface. Because there’s no there there. These, I can’t quite figure out how to edit. There aren’t ideas to chase or arguments to challenge and make better. And I suspect it’s because ChatGPT has done the work, which means there isn’t any depth to find. It’s all just surface.
Why can’t ChatGPT write?
As you know, my good friend Mirya (#mhaws) and I host writing retreats. With all of her success researching and publishing and all of my success editing and all of the conversations we have with each other about how to help folks write better, our advice boils down to saying one thing, over and over. You just need to write. Yeah, institutions suck. You still need to write. Yeah, teaching is exhausting. You still need to write. Yeah, democracy feels like it’s under existential threat. Write.
And this is because—I promise you—the thinking is in the writing. Your ideas are messy and entangled and imprecise and they need to arrive at somewhere with crispness and clarity, and the only way to do that is to write through it. You can’t edit a blank page, and through the act of editing and poking at sentences and rearranging paragraphs and being frustrated because the structure isn’t quite right—that’s where the writing is. And ChatGPT can’t do that.
This isn’t good news. I wish there was a shortcut! But the thing about technology is that it ought to free us up to do what humans do best. And what we do best is write. Think. Create. Argue. And that’s messy and complicated to do well, and there are no shortcuts to it.
An invitation
So, here’s your penultimate invitation (I’ll remind you next week too). Write with us during AcWriMo (More info here, Register here)! Let yourself create something messy, or take something messy and revise it until it’s sparkles, even if there’s some roughness still around the edges. You’re better than ChatGPT! Spend November proving it to yourself.
Write good things,
Kelly
What’s Going On Around Here
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Fall 2025 Writers’ Circles, September-November 2025
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AcWriMo 2025, November 2025
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What a great article! I love the knitting simile!