Why AI Is Incorrigibly Didactic; The Atlantic, June 15, 2026

 Adam Kirsch, The Atlantic; Why AI Is Incorrigibly Didactic

"AI writing never challenges the way we think or see. It can’t do so, even if you explicitly ask it to. And this limitation reveals something important about the source of human creativity. All writing, all speech, has to follow conventions; to know how to use a language is to know how other people already use it. But it’s also possible to find new ways of using it, to say things in a way no one has ever heard before. This possibility exists because we can appeal to something more fundamental than language—our experiences of reality, which are so varied and surprising that language can never exhaust them...

An LLM “is simply generating the next token according to learned patterns. Yet from the outside, readers often perceive a distinctive voice.”

And that is why the rise of AI writing represents a great opportunity for literature, even as it makes life harder for professional writers. When photography was developed in the 19th century, it replaced painting for most utilitarian purposes; a camera could document what things looked like more accurately and cheaply than a painter could. But the art of painting didn’t die out. On the contrary, it entered a golden age: Freed from the obligation of realism, painters developed radical new ways of seeing, such as Impressionism, Cubism, and abstract expressionism. Now AI has the potential to liberate literature in the same way. In a world full of emptily competent prose, we need writers daring, challenging, and obstinate enough to tell us what it’s like to be human, “from the inside.”"