The Threat of Generative Writing

26 Oct, 2026

Right, I haven't written anything about AI writing yet. Everyone else on Bear seems to have said something. I wasn't going to comment on it even though I run an online literary magazine.

However.

Today I was scrolling through reddit on my phone and as usual I get shown some "recommended" subs. The name of this sub? r/WritingWithAI. It's exactly what you think it is. Folks who like reading stories and want to very quickly step over the bit where you need to learn to write before attempting to write a book.

This is where the hypocrisy light shows up on my dashboard as I drive through this thought tunnel because I do use Codex when making websites/software. I'm currently doing a course on SalesForce for side money. Throw me in the trash. The leopards are choking on my teeth. The rest of this blog post is now morally invalid. But I feel like ya'll deserve to know.

I don't use AI for my creative writing. It would take me longer to explain what I wanted than it would for me to do it myself. Code is different, its syntax has strict rules, exact documentation, etc. We can all tell if a story is written with AI because it will use specific syntax, tropes, and dialog that are common with the genre you asked it to model the story on. Nobody wants that in their writing, you want it to be genuine and new.

In all my other writing groups and such, the consensus is all about how to write without leaning on tropes and copying each other. Some genres require certain tropes/rules like romance and mystery but you know what I mean. We read books and write stories to advance in the craft aspect of it all.

But today, when saw that subreddit I had to click on it to see what on earth they were up to. Now, I found some stuff I assumed would be there. Folks talking about running out of credits before finishing a book. Folks talking about how fun it is to have the bot write out their personal fan-fiction. Folks posting about their latest app that helps you automate writing - just log into your current model.

What got me was seeing the tools these folks were using. Sudowrite, Novel Mage, Copyai, and Quillbot all look like proper end user apps. I was expecting far less sophisticated stuff. These all cost money of course, just like any ai service. You can't have it shit out a print-ready novel in a day without paying a decent chunk of money. Those who can afford to run the models locally already have desktop computer money.

Writing it yourself is free.¹

Used to in writing groups people would complain about how expensive it was to have a cover made or to have someone edit your book. Now it seems like folks are talking about how expensive their AI service is.

In 2019 I spent about $500 on editing for Redbriar and we still had a few errors slip through. And it's the copy/line editing options that I see popping up the most in these new model tools. Folks who write their own work could potentially run their manuscript through an editor model and have it check for basic stuff like grammar and syntax. The same way we use it to check code in software applications.

Many other small lit mags have a "No AI" requirement in the submission guidelines. I have one too. I want people to tell me their own stories and not the same New Year's Eve 1999 story over and over. But now I'm seeing these tools that border between generating the story for you and just doing copy edits (spelling, grammar, etc). Right now these apps are all third party products, but it's only a matter of time before they end up baked into Microsoft Word and Scrivener.

Adobe slowly sprinkled in the AI options over the last few years. Any time I open Photoshop it pops up with AI assisted options for autofill and removing items. This used to just be simple stuff like spot healer, clone stamp, and all that. But now it's like, is Photoshop using AI to generate the sputter and scratches of brushes? Would I be able to tell?

And "Would I be able to tell?" is the big issue. Because right now in Word I can turn on the grammar check to yell at me for my terrible use of commas. I have been using spell check since 1994. At what point will they start having options like AI assisted style checks? (MLA, Chicago, etc.) At what point will the grammar check become a lot stronger?

I bring this up because I started to see some magazines and publishers talk about the concept of banning the use of grammar and spell checking for this reason. They are wanting to have doc files that show the history to make sure you aren't copy/pasting from outside sources.

At what point do our writing tools end up like our graphics tools where some aspects of the software are using models by default? And at what point will it be next to impossible to tell if a writer did it themselves simply because it was typed out? Do we have to go true manuscript mode (by hand) or bust out the movable type? (Even then you can manually copy generated text so...)

If I say, "Hey I didn't use AI to write this book." would anyone believe me if I didn't live stream the entire process on Youtube?

Could I trust my editor to not just throw the whole manuscript into a model and fix all my errors? Could I trust a publisher to not print "clean" variants of my book for school libraries? Even then, what would stop them from having a model translate everything before it goes out in other countries?

Having the model generate the story itself is easy to avoid. Just don't ask it to. The real danger is in the editing room. I am going to have to fully trust that my editor doesn't have chat do the editing for her. She wouldn't have to read it. She wouldn't have to make the notes. It would cross reference genre expectations and IP conflicts. The whole thing could be done in a day. And now my AI-free book gets flagged by the AI scrapers from Amazon and such when it gets uploaded to Ingram.

Plus, I'm publishing this thing next year which means the models will be even stronger.