Are AI writing tools like performance-enhancing steroids?

It’s next to impossible these days to avoid the panic being generated, no pun intended, by AI writing tools. 

One day, a book is reportedly sent to the chipper after software decides it was generated by AI. The next, a writer is being scolded for publishing too much and too quickly, thanks to the help of a bot. The tone is always one of alarm, as though we have suddenly stumbled into an unprecedented moral crisis.

We haven’t.

The literary world has always loved a purity test and is inclined to divide writers into the worthy and the suspect. In this case, the division is between the real and the fake. The common denominator is suffering. More pain, apparently, produces more virtuous prose. So it should come as no surprise that whenever a new writing tool arrives, someone decides it has corrupted the craft. That instinct is older than AI.

Before I go any further, though, a confession is in order. I was hesitant to even write this, never mind publish it. But I suspect a lot of writers will recognize themselves in it, even if they don’t say so out loud. I’m reminded of when I published my first book, a manifesto for expat wives brave enough to admit they had not acclimatized very well. Back then, there were things one was simply not supposed to say out loud. 

Long before chatbots appeared, Nobel Prize-winning author Gabriel García Márquez was already being judged critically for embracing a machine that made writing easier. When “Love in the Time of Cholera” was published in 1985, critics noted that it was the first novel he wrote entirely on an Apple Macintosh. Some thought the prose felt too polished and perfect. The computer, apparently, had made his labour too invisible. The cut and paste function in particular came under fire for eliminating the suffering of his rewriting. Seriously.

Which is exactly the complaint now being leveled at AI.

This has made me think about the scandals surrounding performance-enhancing drugs in sports. Not because writers are athletes, though many of us behave as if we’re engaged in a hero’s journey each time we face a blank page. The real similarity is the moral choreography around concealment. Athletes who use steroids aren’t only condemned for taking them. They’re condemned for denying taking them and for pretending their winning result came entirely from ordinary effort. 

Writers do the same thing.

And I say that with no smugness at all, because I know I do it too.

If I use Perplexity to help me draft an opening or rescue a sentence that is too muddled, I often find myself quietly scrubbing away the evidence. Sometimes I do it with the help of AI, which is where the whole thing begins to feel both practical and faintly absurd. I joked to Rodney recently that after reading the endless number of Substack columns about the “tells” of AI-generated prose, I should go through the drafted chapters of my new book edited with the help of AI. His response was immediate: ask Perplexity to do it for you. My head almost exploded at the meta implications.

That, really, is what fascinates me. The problem is not simply that writers use AI. The problem is that many of us feel we need to conceal that use, which tells you everything you need to know about the moral climate around it. If the tool were truly neutral in the public imagination, nobody would care. But because it alters the appearance of effort, people immediately begin asking whether the work still counts.

Every major writing technology has been treated with suspicion. The typewriter made writing too mechanical. The word processor looked like a shortcut by eliminating the need to constantly retype a manuscript. Even the computer, before it became ordinary, carried the faint odor of cheating. In all likelihood, a smooth-writing ball point pen probably came under fire for helping a writer avoid painful cramping. The fact is, each invention made something easier and each time, someone mistook ease for corrupting the process.

Maybe the trouble isn’t that writing got easier using AI, but that it stopped looking holy. And in the absence of holiness, writers are falling back on their oldest sport: tearing each other apart. They may as well use AI to draft the diatribe. Nothing drains outrage quite like a machine.