Sixteen years ago, Martin Amis unwittingly encapsulated the problem with AI-generated writing

The author Martin Amis, who died at the age of 73 over the weekend, was known and loved by readers and authors for his unique syntax. In particular, he hated cliché, which he described to Charlie Rose in this 2007 interview as the product of “herd writing, herd thinking, herd feeling.”

You can imagine, then, how he must have felt about ChatGPT.

Chatbots are trained on billions of words and ideas scraped from the internet. So you’re not getting original thought—certainly not your own original thought—when you recruit ChatGPT as a ghostwriter. You’re getting a mathematical aggregate of the most-used words or ideas in a given context. Clichés, in other words. That’s why “generated” writing has a hollowness to it; there’s nothing warm-blooded steering the sentence.

“[Y]ou’ve got to look for weight of voice and freshness, and make it your own—this is what writers do,” Amis told Rose. “What you do is be faithful to your perceptions and transmit them as faithfully as you can.”

“I say these sentences in my head again and again until they sound right,” Amis said about his own process. “There’s no objective reason why they’re right—they just sound right to me.”