AI Drafting My Stories? Over My Dead Body
Sportswriting legend Red Smith once said it was easy to write a column: “All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.” » But in 2026, no blood is needed. All you have to do is sit down in front of a laptop and ask Claude or ChatGPT to write the story for you.
This seems to be the conclusion of a set of reports published recently on the journalistic front. Last month, my colleague Maxwell Zeff wrote about writers who shamelessly generate at least some of their prose via unsigned AI collaborators. The star of his article was Alex Heath, a tech journalist who said he regularly asked the AI to write drafts based on his notes, interview transcripts and emails. That same week, the Wall Street Journal profiled Fortune reporter Nick Lichtenberg, who told the paper that he relies heavily on AI to produce his work. He has written 600 short stories since July; one day last February, he had seven signatures.
Since reading these reports – fortunately produced by human hands – I have had trouble sleeping. Until recently, the consensus was that using large linguistic models to create commercial prose was prohibited. Many publications, including WIRED, have strong guidelines against AI-generated text. We also don’t use it for editing, which is a less alarming, though still annoying, practice compared to several other practices cited in Zeff’s column. The book publishing world, trying to protect itself from an avalanche of self-published trash, continues to police its catalog; Hachette Book Group recently retracted a novel that apparently relied too heavily on the results of an LLM. But as models produce prose that is increasingly difficult to distinguish from human output, the convenience and economics of using AI for the difficult work of writing threaten to seep into the mainstream. The walls are starting to collapse.
As expected, many people were unhappy to learn of this development, especially those like me whose keyboards are dripping with blood. But the subjects of the stories do not recede. It’s as if they feel that the future is on their side. When I contacted Heath – whose work I respect – he confirmed he had been pushed back, but shrugged it off. “I view AI as a tool,” he says. “I don’t see it replacing anything: the only thing being replaced is a chore I didn’t want to do anyway.”
Of course, the hard work of writing is, for people like me, an essential part of the whole effort, to tackle the task of communicating effectively and clearly. Heath believes he connects with readers through his writing: he says he trained his AI to be like him, and his Substack includes personally written information about what he does. On the other hand, he tells me that since talking to Zeff, he has almost “one-shot” some of his columns. “When I say all at once, I mean I had almost nothing to do,” he says. But Heath disputes the idea that letting AI write prose for him means he has bypassed the thought process that many believe can only happen through actual writing. “I’m just getting rid of this very complicated and painful blank page, from zero to one,” he says.
The Fortune writer who was the subject of the Journal article also faced repercussions, not only from the public but also from his friends and colleagues. “I feel tension in my close and personal relationships,” Lichtenberg admitted in an interview with the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism. In an email, Fortune editor-in-chief Alyson Shontell tried to steer me away from the idea that AI was taking over the work of the journalists under its leadership. ” Above all, [Lichtenberg] “I don’t use it as a replacement for writing,” she wrote. “His stories are AI-assisted rather than AI-written. He still does a lot of ambitious reporting, analysis and editing, which is very original.
