How easy is it to spot AI writing?

Wherein I Find Myself Writing About Writing

Most everyone finds writing to be challenging (especially those who say they enjoy it). This is because writing is an intentional, thoughtful act. This is as it should be, but “AI” has recently exacerbated the misbelief that writing is simply an output. In fact, it's a creative process that has merit in and of itself.

Writing With AI Is Harder Than You Think

It takes rigor, judgment, and willingness to be told your work isn't good enough.

How to write well with AI

Why people who pledge never to write with AI are telling on themselves

I pulled ~90,000 Reddit posts about what makes writing "sound like AI" to determine the biggest AI-slop giveaways (Part 2)

674 votes, 228 comments. The majority of people can instantly tell when writing is generated by AI. For those who don't intend to get into the weeds…

Writers Who Use AI Are Not Real Writers

Dorothy Parker famously (but probably not really) said, “I hate to write, but I love having written,” which is a sentiment I don’t largely understand or agree with in the broader …

From bench to bot: Why AI-powered writing may not deliver on its promise

Efficiency isn’t everything. The cognitive work of struggling with prose may be a crucial part of what drives scientific progress.

Ethan Mollick on Twitter / X

There is a lot being written about the stylistic tells of AI writing (em-dashes, etc.) but this paper looks at AI narrative tellsFascinating differences between AI & human narrative, and asking AI to write in different styles doesn't do much to change it https://t.co/azkRHz34NQ pic.twitter.com/oTxSGBNYYE— Ethan Mollick (@emollick) May 28, 2026

The only reason you’ll ever need not to write with AI — The Carlson Lab

Over the last year, our lab has been developing a policy on AI use. To do this, we did three main things: We read a lot of academic publications and tech news. We set up an #ai channel on our lab Slack to share news, experiences, and memes. We had several long and grueling lab meetings talk

StoryScope: Investigating idiosyncrasies in AI fiction

As AI-generated fiction becomes increasingly prevalent, questions of authorship and originality are becoming central to how written work is evaluated. While most existing work in this space...

God Damn AI is making me dumb

It's so god damn tempting to use AI to write. Whether it is articles, code, or documents. I feel like using AI is diminishing my ability to write myself. ...

I wrote an AI textbook — how long until AI can do it better?

Reflections on AI's writing ability and how AI models get more capable.

Writing With and Beyond AI: Fieldnotes from Computer-Mediated Poetry

Apr 10, 2026, 12:15 pm - Large language models can make writing mind-numbingly efficient — but the point of writing with AI should be to write what we couldn’t have written alone (without generating bland, derivative “slop”).

Literature fans should welcome AI as a fellow wordsmith | Aeon Essays

Strong resistance to AI among writers is understandable. But it obscures what we share with the machines: language itself

How the AI Writing Panic Is Making Us All Worse Writers

This applies to those who use AI to write and those who don’t

AI assistants can sway writers’ attitudes, even when they’re watching for bias | Cornell Chronicle

Cornell Tech researchers found that writers who used biased AI auto-suggestions saw their views gravitate toward the AI’s positions without their realizing it — even when they were made aware of the biased AI.