columns.
Authorial pieces with a clear voice — 5 to 10 minutes. Position, opinion, angle.
19 pieces — across all sections
I Saw Goody Proctor Talking to Claude: When AI "Detection" Backlashes
While authors' and readers' concern about AI in writing is often reasonable, claims without proof run rampant, particularly in popular genres. Unfounded accusations may do more damage than AI itself, even for those who oppose the technology entirely
Nurse, Scalpel!
Whether the AI is "assistive" or "generative" is the wrong question. The better one: whose idea was it?
The Power Is Yours… Sort Of: AI Writing and the Environment
Do you have to apologize to Recycle Rex every time you ask an LLM for a hand with your writing? Here are some tips to reduce your impact
Abbot Trithemius, 1492: Anyone Who Asks Why We Must Still Copy by Hand Is Concealing His Own Sloth
Texts grow cheap, professions die, writers go slack: how we have spent the past five hundred years
Too Hot, Too Cold, and Just Right: Why AI Picked Up the Rule of Three and How Humans Can Deal With That
Groups of three come from basic geometry and human perception, so it's natural for AI to incorporate them — but telling the difference may be as simple as one plus one
Masterwork or Mass Product?
Curators demand originality; digital platforms try to filter content. The new art ignores these boundaries and is taking shape spontaneously in social media feeds
The Final Test of Intelligence
There was a time when people feared machines too dim to be trusted and walked away. The machines got smarter. Now people fear machines too clever to be trusted — and they’re walking away again
The Fingerprints of Fanfiction
How a niche internet subculture brought LLMs’ data-gathering processes into the spotlight
The Confident Average
Artificial intelligence doesn't kill creativity. It simply strips out everything alive in it: error, chance, noise.
Love in the Time of LLMs: A Romance Novelist's Experience With the Anthropic Suit
Recent court cases are testing the legality of training AI on copyrighted work. It's a complicated issue, and so are the ethics
A Brief History of Slop: Why Flawless Text Triggers Both Delight and Disgust
AI has finally learned to write perfectly. That's the worst thing that could have happened to writing.
My Friend Sounds Like ChatGPT Now — and It's Not All Bad
Some are losing their voice. Others are finding one for the first time
NLP Is Back. Now Its Victims Are Neural Networks
Half a century ago, two Californians figured out how to control people through language. Today the same thing is being done to neural networks — and they call it a profession
A council of robots: five models debate whether they're human enough
The experiment: ask five flagship models to stop nodding along and actually argue with each other about the fate of the author. What came out of it: panicked self-reflection, Chinese Taoism, two aphorism slams, and one uncomfortable "we" that all the models reached for with suspicious eagerness.
The New Female Intelligence
Women have been writing prompts their whole lives — explaining, reframing, iterating. A personal essay on emotional labor, AI, and why soft skills turned out to be the most powerful ones of all.
AI Doesn't Steal Your Voice If You Don't Give It Away
Texts written "with AI assistance" all sound the same, but the tool isn't to blame — the decision is. You choose whether or not to hand the model the one thing that makes writing yours
Scene Twelve In Draft
It’s midnight, and I'm writing a screenplay for my girlfriend's thesis.
Gender Bias in AI: Why Language Models Speak in a Male Voice
How every language model ended up speaking in the same calm, masculine voice, and why hundreds of millions of women hear that voice today
I Asked You to Find a Mind, Not a Perfect Liar
Seventy-five years ago, I devised a game in the hope of measuring machine intelligence.
