Why Does It Matter That I’m Reading So Much More AI-Enhanced Work?
Laments from an editor-publisher on generic, flat, uninspired writing
I’m having to learn a new skill that I never wanted to learn: how to spot AI-generated content when I see it. Welcome to our new world, where one of our most important skillsets is separating the authentic from the imitation, the real from the fake. Thanks so much, ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini.
The gift of this unwanted training is that I’ve learned the value of being a professional reader. Professional reader isn’t something you see much on resumes. We editors take for granted that we’re professional readers. We feel words in our bones. We’re attuned to cadence and rhythm. And we know the difference between prose that is heartfelt and “felt” versus generated and “flat.” Like a sommelier to wine, professional readers can articulate what makes prose sing versus what makes it pedestrian. So, I know how to describe AI-generated writing when I see it. It’s not the kind of wine anyone would recommend. It tastes generic, with tones of well-polished, shiny, and clean. It’s indistinct, nondescript, trying but failing to imitate other brands.
I’m in the process of putting together AI guidelines for our submissions at She Writes Press because we’ve formally started to reject AI-generated submissions. Here's an example from a recent memoir submission we rejected on these grounds:
At the time, I was still seeing someone else. I mentioned to Alex that another person had shown genuine interest—had made it clear that they wanted me.
The man I was dating just shrugged. Told me to go ahead and find out where it might lead. That was all the answer I needed. If you can release someone without a second thought, you probably never truly had them to begin with.
Telling Alex was like striking a match. Something sparked. He called. He appeared. He asked questions—real ones. He wanted to know everything. For the first time in ages, I felt someone listening not to fill the silence, but to understand me.
We had attraction, yes—but more than that, we had curiosity. Our outlooks matched: a little jaded, a little scarred, still holding on to hope. We made each other laugh. We made each other feel seen. We couldn’t get enough of discovering each other. People talk about someone “feeling like home,” and that’s exactly what it was—comfortable, familiar, and entirely right.
I hadn’t used one of these popular AI-detectors that teachers are leaning on before this morning, but I plugged in this text to see what GPTZero would say and these were its results: 1% AI-generated, 7% human-generated, and 92% “mixed.”
The “mixed” part gives me pause, of course, because I know many people are using AI to “enhance” their writing. I have “mixed” feelings about this because, folks, writing is hard. Learning to become a better writer should take practice, and the process of wrestling with words on the page to find that perfect combination that makes your body tingle with a yes is something you earn, and not something to filter through AI. IMHO, at least.
The whole passage is lacking, but what set off alarm bells for me was the very generic reflection:
“If you can release someone without a second thought, you probably never truly had them to begin with.”
As my teenager would say: Duh.
This generic insight takes no risks. It says nothing about the person who’s doing the releasing, which is the first question I’d ask if I were this person’s editor. What does it say about you that you can release someone without a second thought? I’d also ask, Is this something you do often? Is it a pattern? Memoir is nothing without self-awareness.
If I were to redirect this insight, it would look something like this (100% human-generated):
That I could release him without a second thought shook me up. I hadn’t realized I’d been on autopilot. I was disturbed to discover I didn’t even want to see him. We both walked away without closure beyond a text. I’d pecked out a line about there being someone else, and that was all he needed to cut me loose. Released. Cut loose. I was just another fish in the sea that he’d happened to catch. It had been convenience with us, nothing more. So, why had I stayed so long? That night in bed, I wondered what it said about me that I needed to have someone else lined up before I could admit to myself that I didn’t care about this person at all? What did it say about him? We’d been in each other’s lives only in body, not in heart. This made us utterly replaceable to one another. Swappable for any other man or woman we might see on the street, or scroll past on the dating app. You can know a person in mind and body alone, but you can’t love a person without opening your heart.
I’m not saying this is a perfect revision, but it’s a revision! On its way, at least.
The other day I had a conversation with an editor I know who told me that the majority of the work she’s doing these days is for clients hiring her to make their prose sound more human. My heart actually clenched. Yes, this is a cliché. I had a cliché experience, thanks to AI—and I find that perfectly fitting.
Sometimes I listen to Kara Swisher and Scott Galloway on “Pivot,” and on a recent episode Scott was saying something about the fact that tech design jobs are on the rise because AI is a tool and a framework only. “Design is the salsa to the chip of AI,” Scott said.
I liked that a lot because I’m trying not to be mad at AI. It’s just a boring tortilla chip, and we humans have to bring the sauces that make it worth eating. How this applies to writers is a little more nuanced, but the message resonates: Bring the salsa to the party, not just a bag of chips! This is what I’m feeling when I read these submissions. Bag of chips. No dips. No salsa. Boring, but actually worse than boring. Heart-clenching. (I know.)
Read something that makes your brain and your heart sizzle and then please aspire to that. I’m reading Myriam Gurba’s memoir, Mean, in preparation to have her on the Memoir Nation podcast in our new season. She is something. Even though she’s a literary darling, I still want to say she’s underrated. Her prose crackles. There’s heat. There’s tension. I have laughed out loud—often. She’s managed to shock me (not an easy thing to do). Her language is creative, daring, unexpected. There’s nothing generic about it. If I’m going to hang with you for an entire book-length experience, you gotta at least engage me. With Mean, I can’t wait to get back to it. There’s no higher praise than that.
For those of you using AI to enhance your writing, I want to say that I understand the impulse. I can see how it helps people to get unstuck. How Chat and Claude can be thought partners to help you go deeper. But once you start feeding your prose into AI and asking it for suggestions to make your writing better, you’ve walked to the edge of the pit. Avoid this. It’s compromising, and we, the professional readers you’re hoping to win over, can taste it. More and more these days, even when I don’t know, I know. And this knowing translates to readers because readers know too. After all, a sommelier may impress you with how they speak about the wines tones and flavors and notes, but all that matters is whether the person intending to drink it likes it. So, too, with books.
Quick announcement! I invite you to join me on Monday, August 18, for a free 1-hour event I’m doing with ZenJen Brown at The Zen Circle. It’s at 3.30 PT/6.30 ET and we’re going to be talking about authorship, ownership, staying the course, and authenticity in your writing, which is why this post feels like an appropriate place to plug this if you’ve made it this far. Thanks and I’d love to see you there. It’s free!
As someone who has worked for years to write well, I really appreciate this! Put in the time. Dig inside yourself. Love your own words. It's so satisfying!
How did that make you feel? How did it change you? Those are the insights we're looking for when we read memoir. AI scares me, and I've never used CGBT, but at some point, it will educate itself to become "more self-aware," and that's perhaps an even scarier proposition because AI is not human, so what is its self-awareness?
My first husband invented the personal computer and the microprocessor, and I remember being in a theater with him in 1972, watching the film Silent Running with Bruce Dern. It was my first inkling that while we thought AI was the answer to all our problems, it might be our downfall. Before most of the greenery on Earth became extinct due to our harmful environmental policies, plant specimens were sent into space in giant greenhouses, hoping to keep them alive until Earth became a more plant-friendly environment. When the "powers that be" decided to abandon the effort, Bruce Dern, one of the greenhouse pilots, disobeys orders in hopes of saving his forest. As the film ends, Dern is injured, and we see his last remaining robot, caring for the plants with Dern's old and battered watering can. As the credits rolled, my husband started crying and said, "What have we done?"