I had lunch with an author friend a while back who told me about people using AI to write three novels a day. Publishing them. Plural — a day.
Sit with that for a second.
The machines are now good enough that they can out-produce any human writer by a factor of thousands, and produce prose cleaner than most published authors manage. So the logic of the button-pushers is brutally simple: if I can’t compete on craft, I’ll compete on volume. Flood the zone. Win on sheer tonnage.
And here’s the thing — on the old terms, on the attention terms, they might even be right. If the game is reach, volume is a perfectly rational weapon.
But look what they’ve conceded to play it.
They’ve handed over the one thing that was ever actually theirs. The taste. The judgment. The fingerprints. The slightly-wrong, entirely-particular you-ness that was the only thing a machine couldn’t reach for. They’ve competed their own humanness right out of the work — to win a game whose prize is evaporating anyway.
That humanness is the moat. Not as a slogan — as the literal, last, uncopyable thing.
Because there’s a quality that shows up when a real person is genuinely in the work — when skill meets attention meets a situation that can’t be fully planned in advance, and something more comes up through it than you consciously put in. The old word for it is poiesis — a bringing-forth. A “whooshing up,” using the language of Sean Dorrance Kelly & Hubert Dreyfus.
You’ve felt it. It’s the difference between two things that look identical on the surface, where one is assembled and the other is somehow alive. You can’t always say why. But you just feel the maker in it.
Read Moby-Dick. Read Infinite Jest. Read Blood Meridian. Read Agassi’s Open. Read Crime & Punishment.
A machine can assemble. It can’t “whoosh.” The value was never only in the artifact — it’s in the human enactment the artifact is a record of. The provenance Khosla was pointing at isn’t a sticker that says handmade. It’s this.
And it’s maddening, honestly, because the thing is real but it won’t fully sit still for language — you can sense it laughing just around the corner, and the moment you reach for it, it’s moved. (I’ve spent a lot of words chasing it. I wrote the whole thing up here, if you want the longer, rougher version.)
I use AI every day, to be clear. I love it. It sits across the table while I work — catching the lines that don’t land, surfacing what I’ve missed, pushing me toward a clearer version of the thing. A sparring partner. An interlocutor. But never the voice.
As a hopeless dyslexic, AI spell-check is magic fairy dust. Someone who still can’t spell at 53, for whom reading is an MMA bout (Audible: another gift). So when a sentence feels right — or feels wrong — it’s not coming from any grasp of syntax, which may as well be Mandarin to me. It’s a felt thing. A rhythm. A drumbeat I either catch or don’t.
I often break syntactical rules, not for dramatic effect, but because the expression felt best. Weird, I know. But it’s all I got.
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