Yeah, I mean duuuuh — this is the kind of shit we do in 2026.

OK, before we even get into this nonsense, let's get the "value" element straight.

NO, you idiot... if there's a thing — call it a magic wand — that can effortlessly do the thing you charged people for doing, then no, your VALUE is lower. Fucking basic. And I can't believe that Marche isn't reading Den... dude, we've been talking about this for literally years — as recently as a few days ago: #1463052 (also music: #796401, #798342)

Also, plenty of people have written AI books so far. Some are still pretty decent #1425743

Background wrapper to his column is some commentariat story about a self-published/Hachette book revealed to have used AI in generation. OK, cool

Apparently readers and editors didn’t mind until the use of AI was pointed out to them.

for writers, and for young writers in particular, AI has a more practical significance. A recent survey found that 86% of college students use AI regularly, which means that 14% are lying to survey-takers. The ordinary business of quotidian language – writing student essays, emails, memos, all the granular sentence-by-sentence work that once trained writers in their craft – is dissolving. Mastery of style, the laborious gift of the skilled writer, is being automated.

Ok, and then Mr. Marche gets into the interesting weeds of things here... do infinite content generation make us more or less productive? (dare I say more or less valuable?!)

There seem to be two options facing writers. The first is not to use AI at all, or to pretend not to use it. The other is to automate their writing practice. The first is retrograde and fearful. The second forgets that art is a human practice, made by people for people.

Human practice, by people for people. @TotallyHumanWriter could have said this.

I guess I'm on the record agreeing with him here (=we gotta become curators/selectors, not generators):

"The new cliche among tech lords is the need for taste in the artificially intelligent future. How do you think you develop taste? By reading. By writing. By being trained in reading and writing.""The new cliche among tech lords is the need for taste in the artificially intelligent future. How do you think you develop taste? By reading. By writing. By being trained in reading and writing."

Yup:

All killer, no filler:
What LLMs do well, particularly ones shaped by human learning feedback, is generate convincing expressions of dead language. The more formulaic the task, the better they are. Software coding is their primary ability. But literary students, asked to write formulaic essays, asked to produce answers in a code, naturally use AI to compose them. Generative models are fundamentally cliche machines.

dude invokes a chess analogy(!), which I'll have more to say about in a separate post!

I wrote Death of an Author through prompts, but the process was no easier than simply writing. Controlled language requires control over language, whether you’re using AI or a fountain pen. It took me years to create a truly regenerative work, what no human could do

this also strikes me as true. Maybe we ought not to worry too much...? AI-generated slop is just a different kind of slop; cream rises to the top, etc.

FINALLY, and here dude is 100% correct:

It is worth remembering that most art has always been slop. When I did my PhD on early modern drama, my supervisor made me read every tragedy written in English until 1640. The process was grueling but instructive. Almost all of them, the fruits of the definitive art form of the greatest period in English literature, were garbage. Go and watch what was on TV in the 80s, if you want a more contemporary example.

Most stuff made by most people at most points are complete rubbish. Better ignore it.

"To write now is to wage war against cliche as usual, just this time with the AI and against it.""To write now is to wage war against cliche as usual, just this time with the AI and against it."