Newspapers Need to Stop Pretending AI Doesn’t Exist

The other day, I received an automated e-mail response from an editor at a major Canadian newspaper. Along with the paper’s writing guidelines, it came with this warning: “Please confirm that no AI was used at any stage in the creation of the article.”

No AI. At any stage. In the creation.

Think about that for a minute or two. I certainly did.

The opinion editor wasn’t just asking me to disclose if I used AI. I was being asked to certify that I hadn’t used artificial intelligence at any stage of my writing process. Does that include Google searches using Gemini? The predictive text that finishes my sentences? Spell or grammar check? 

The request felt absurdly Victorian. Like I was being asked to confirm I’d written my submission with quill and pen, sitting at my escritoire.

I once wrote about my yearning to be a Victorian writer, back before Perplexity became part of daily life. I imagined myself circa 1850, awakening each morning, impatient to begin writing. My pens and inkwells would be spilling from drawers and a footman would arrive mid-morning with tea and cookies. I’d compose poetry blissfully free from digital distractions eviscerating my nervous system. 

But that newspaper’s guidelines made me realize that my nostalgia for “pure” writing, that is, untainted by technology, is just as ridiculous now as it would have been to insist Victorian writers stick with goose quills and reject that newfangled gizmo, the fountain pen.

The truth is that AI is already woven into every aspect of modern writing, whether we acknowledge it or not. Judging by the Substack columns I’ve been reading lately, there are a hell of a lot of writers who would prefer to ignore the giant AI elephant in the room.

My digital minimalism guru, Cal Newport, addressed exactly this panic in his 2023 article for The New Yorker, “What Kind of Mind Does ChatGPT Have?” Newport argues that our fear comes from treating these tools as “mysterious black boxes” when we should understand what’s actually happening.

His key insight? “A system like ChatGPT doesn’t create, it imitates.” It doesn’t form original ideas, rather “it instead copies, manipulates, and pastes together text that already exists, originally written by human intelligences, to produce something that ‘sounds’ like how a real person would talk.”

These systems, Newport writes, “turn out to run on the well-worn digital logic of pattern-matching, pushed to a radically larger scale.” They’re not sentient machines but really just sophisticated pattern-matchers. 

Doesn’t that make you feel better?

This is important context for what that newspaper is really asking of its writers. They’re trying to ban pattern-matching tools while ignoring that pattern-matching algorithms are already embedded in every single digital tool we use.

When a writer researches a topic, search engines use AI to rank results. Grammar tools use machine learning to suggest improvements. My note-taking app uses algorithms to point me toward related ideas. Even my word processor predicts my next word based on patterns learned from scraping the web.

So asking a writer to confirm “no AI was used at any stage” is asking them to work with one hand tied behind their back and to pretend they’re working that way when everyone knows they’re not.

When calculators were first banned in math classes, the intention was noble and not unlike today’s Substack headlines about preserving critical thinking skills or ensuring an acceptable amount of suffering went into the writing. (Ah yes, the romantic notion that good writing requires pain.)

But here we are in 2026. How can you avoid learning about tools that aren’t going away without becoming this century’s Luddite? The goal should be using tools while maintaining intellectual integrity.

That’s exactly why I adopted digital minimalism and started following Newport in the first place. I didn’t want to toss all my digital tools aside. I wanted to change how I use them.

Newport acknowledges that “it’s hard to predict exactly how these large language models will end up integrated into our lives.” But he emphasizes that understanding their actual capabilities is essential. “ChatGPT is amazing,” he writes, “but in the final accounting it’s clear that what’s been unleashed is more automaton than golem.”

More automaton than golem. I like that.

Newspapers need to evolve their policies to reflect this reality. Instead of asking writers to certify they didn’t use AI “at any stage,” why not ask about meaningful human authorship: Did you develop the core argument? Are these your original ideas? Can you defend your reasoning?

These questions address the actual concern over authenticity and quality without requiring writers to cosplay as Luddites.

There’s no going back to the Victorian era, no matter how romantic my daydreams make it seem. The question isn’t whether we’ll use AI in our writing—we already are. The question is whether we’ll use it thoughtfully, transparently, and in service of genuinely human expression.

That major Canadian newspaper will eventually figure this out, I hope. Until then, I’ll keep writing with all the tools available to me, crediting AI where appropriate (hi, Perplexity!), and leading with my distinctly human voice.

Because that’s what they really should be worried about preserving. And that’s this particular human’s opinion.