Last week, an essay laying out a case for how AI will change knowledge work went enormously viral on X, where it currently sits at 84 million views:
I agree with much of it, though parts were overstated and other parts were clearly submarine marketing. But what was most striking to me wasn’t the content, but the obvious fact that large swathes of it were written by AI. I suspect that the “AI slop” quality was actually part of why it did so well. In 2026, we must face the fact that slop is well-liked. Perfectly formatted writing, with statistics ready at hand, copious length, a chipper tone, and lots of antithetical phrasing — the infamous “it’s not that; it’s this” formula — is showing up everywhere for a reason. People might say they hate it, and I’m sure many do. But the truth is that many other readers clearly enjoy this style of machine-generated prose.
That revealed preference worries me more than anything else.
I learned to read and write quite late (worryingly late, by the standards of millennial parents like myself). At age 8, I was barely literate, way behind classmates. Something clicked at age 9. I read The Lord of the Rings twice before graduating to The Silmarillion. Fifth grade was the year of Michael Crichton. By age 12 it was Virginia Woolf and Tolstoy — both of whom I barely understood. But I loved the unfamiliar sound of the words and the unfamiliar sensations those words evoked. I loved feeling like I could transmute some of those feelings and images into my own words on a page (I even started a novel, which had something to do with an ancient Egyptian goldsmith searching for his father).
Writing became something I was self-evidently good at. It was the one thing in my life that truly opened doors for me.
My first real job after college in 2007 was as an assistant for a crusty New York labor lawyer who wrote exclusively on legal pads and called me “college boy.” He had an incredible memory and an agile mind, but he wasn’t much of a prose stylist. That task was offloaded to me. Every morning, the lawyer would toss yellow legal pads on my desk. It was my job to proofread and “punch up” these rough drafts. I would toil happily for a few hours in Microsoft Word, usually earning his gruff approval by around lunchtime. Then I spent the rest of the day reading about mellified man and cocaine mummies and the like on Wikipedia. I did well enough at this job that it felt like a viable, permanent career.
Needless to say, that career is gone now. Gemini is at least as good at transcribing a lawyer’s longhand as I am, and Claude will undoubtedly output more perfectly formatted legal footnotes than I could ever hope to achieve.
So what is left for human writing?
AI is not coming for regulated jobs in meatspace
As a historian and teacher — distinct from my identity as a writer — I don’t experience much of the existential dread that essays like “Something Big is Happening” seem intent on getting me to feel. As I wrote here, historians rely on non-digitized archives and tacit, often physically-embodied knowledge. That is a very good thing when it comes to resisting replacement by the likes of Anthropic’s newly released Sonnet 4.6 model, which is remarkably good at “computer work” tasks.
... continue reading