What AI Teaches Us About Good Writing

Their relevance is debatable, too — what’s the value we’re trying to preserve by differentiating human writing from AI? Is it really plagiarism not to cite an AI-generated phrase? Is plagiarism still the crime we think it is?

But the technology’s capacity for imitation will likely continue to improve: New Yorker staff writer Kyle Chayka observed that ChatGPT was not very effective at mimicking his own writing voice, but the AI startup, Writer, created a bot trained on his own writing to produce text in his voice that, while not perfect, was still “unnervingly effective.

Reading ChatGPT’s writing feels uncanny because there’s no driver at the wheel, no real connection being built*.*

Indeed, the fact that AI, which is trained to detect and replicate underlying patterns in our writing, can produce such coherent prose is a testament to just how much we rely on convention, both at the sentence and structural level.

Writers who use AI as a drafting tool might be seen as intentionality remixers, drawing copy from ChatGPT as raw material and weaving purpose into the syntax and language. But so far, the chatbot on its own, or even with the support of savvy prompt engineering, does not excel at this particular task.

But because it has no intention, it can’t be purposeful in how it adheres to or strays from the rules. Its arguments are built not from critical thought, but from predictive phrase sequences — it doesn’t “know” what its passages are really about, only that their words tend to occur together, so it lacks the meta-cognitive awareness needed to select

It’s difficult to determine a text’s quality without considering the context in which it was written.

When it lacks instructions to imitate a particular voice, it presumably imitates all of us, averaging our voices together into an indistinct default. Conversing with the chatbot feels like encountering someone you recognize but have never met — a voice of the masses, distant yet familiar.

Broadly, good writing seems to require a balance of conformity and nonconformity, and at times, deliberate rule-breaking. A certain amount of Strunk and White-style convention is necessary to convey ideas coherently — after all, language is a shared system of meaning, and straying too far from its rules risks losing connection with readers or becom