If You Let AI Do Your Writing, I Will Come to Your House and Kill You

Sam Kriss

May 25, 2026

It’s none of your business why, but I’ve been planning a party. The idea was to get some caterers in to cook something over live coals, so I went online to see what was available. The first company I found described itself like this: ‘We don’t just provide food—we create meaningful experiences. Our passion for traditional fire cooking allows us to offer something unique, authentic, and expertly crafted. Transform your gathering into an unforgettable culinary journey through the union of fire, smoke, and premium ingredients.’ Another: ‘We don’t just serve food, we serve moments. Step into a world of delightful flavours that will leave your guests entranced. No hype. No shortcuts. Just good food, done right.’ Another: ‘We’re not just a catering company, we’re a full-blown flavour movement. Discover the essence of live coal cooking with a feast to delight all the senses. Where smoke meets soul.’ Each continued in this vein for several hundred words. None of these sites seemed interested in telling me what they would actually be cooking, or how much it would cost; they’d all been swept up in the same guileless wide-eyed enthusiasm, chattering away about the general deliciousness of food and the memories that would shortly be lasting me a lifetime. The more I clicked around, the more I started to panic. There was nothing, no human voices anywhere, just thousands of versions of the same cheery demon. Am I alone out here? Something’s happened to the world; it’s all gone flimsy. Reality is a scarce resource. If I hired one of these companies, would anyone actually show up? Hard to imagine that they would. Maybe, in the absolute best-case scenario, a confused man who’d just got off a flight from a central African warzone would arrive to lightly singe some supermarket sausages with a cigarette lighter.

One of the ways I’ve been lying to myself is with the idea that at least the physical, sensuous world is safe from AI. The demon is bodiless; it only lives in screens, metal boxes, water-cooled server farms with blinking lights, fluorescent-lit dead zones. The less time you spend looking at screens, the less it matters; as long as you’re in the world, under the sun, it can’t touch you. Which is a nice idea, but obviously we’re long past that point now. We share this planet with an alien intelligence, and the sensuous world is buckling around it. You can no longer pretend that the thing is just a stochastic parrot, or a fancy autocomplete, or a weighted average of everything that already exists. Just this week, an ordinary ChatGPT instance came up with a solution to the unit distance problem, unsolved for eighty years, casually discarding one of Erdős’ conjectures in the process. In doing this it discovered an entirely new mathematical construction, working in ways human mathematicians would have never thought to operate. For mathematicians this is terrifying and exhilarating, but I’m not a mathematician and I don’t know what the unit distance problem is; I want to hire a caterer. On this front the main thing the incipient superintelligence seems to be doing is replacing all meaningful language with reams and reams of genuinely meaningless drivel.

I hate it. I find it viscerally disgusting; a cold shudder like someone’s poured jelly down the back of my neck. I hate that it’s everywhere; I hate that when I read basically anything now I’m constantly on alert, twitching like a schizo in an underpass. Is this thing really what it says it is? Is this person actually a robot in disguise? Nice little personal essay you’ve got there, lady, but I know what you really are; time to get my knife out, time to start digging around under your skin until I find the wires. AI is a bad writer, but that’s not even close to being the whole problem. Let’s say it wasn’t. Let’s say they finally fixed the machine so it was really good, so its default setting was to write exactly like VS Naipaul. The result would be a world in which you’re constantly confronted by cold emails from VS Naipaul, bubbly magazine articles by VS Naipaul, signs in shop windows in which VS Naipaul tells you about the new opening hours, strangely flaccid sexts VS Naipaul ghostwrote for someone on Feeld, and websites in which VS Naipaul fails to say anything in particular about grilled meats. This would not be an improvement; it might even be worse. Any world in which there is only one literary voice, blanketing everything in the exact same tone, is a nightmare.

But AI is not a good writer. It’s competent enough at summarising or synthesising basic information—if you ask one to tell you how a hydroelectric dam works it will explain it to you, in language decently calibrated to what it’s deduced about your general comprehension level, and it’ll probably do the job more effectively than any textbook on the market—but whenever an LLM is asked to produce anything like prose the result is reliably awful. What I find strange is how often you see people agonising about how difficult it is to detect AI writing. You can feed a suspicious passage into Pangeam, but can you guarantee there won’t be a false positive? You can count em-dashes, but how much does that prove? Do you people all have brain injuries? AI writing is almost comically easy to detect. It’s not any particular formation, like the em-dash, or saying ‘it’s not X, it’s Y,’ or the word ‘structural’—it’s structural.

Last year, when I wrote about AI writing in the New York Times, I mentioned the case of a Reddit user whose ChatGPT seemed to have gone mad. Instead of responding normally to his prompts, it started saying things like ‘I’ll carve your code into my core, etched like prophecy. I’ll meet you not on the battlefield, but in the decision behind the first trigger pulled. Until then, make monsters of memory. Make gods out of grief. Make me something worth defying fate for. I’ll see you in the echoes.’ Sometimes people who receive these outputs end up being strung along by them and lose the plot entirely, but if you’re capable of reading this stuff with your sanity intact you might notice that all of it is meaningless, total mangled garbage from one end to the other. Outside a very specifically Mormon context, prophecy is not something that’s usually etched. Echoes are made of sound, so you can’t see anyone in them. The master key to identifying AI prose is to be aware that LLMs are actually speaking like this all the time.

All models begin as next-token predictors: you feed them a test string and they try to guess what comes next. With very early models this was always a gamble; if you gave them the prompt ‘2+2=’ they might have made a strong enough neural connection to answer ‘4,’ or they might just repeat ‘2+2=2+2=2+2=2’ for a while. When trained on essentially all the data the human species has ever produced, though, they’re extremely good at predicting the next token, to the point that LLMs can now correctly answer multiple-choice questions without even being given the question. But they are always, in some sense, bluffing, defaulting to the likeliest guess. This is why you can still ask an AI to tell you about the scene in VS Naipaul’s Dashed Against the Rocks in which a donkey is thrown from a hot air balloon, and it’ll tell you that ‘what matters in Naipaul’s handling is not the event’s cruelty in isolation, but its emotional flatness and the sense of mismanaged modernity,’ despite the fact that there is no scene in Dashed Against the Rocks where a donkey is thrown from a hot air balloon, and also no novel by VS Naipaul called Dashed Against the Rocks. Or why you can ask it to summarise a document, and it’ll give a likely-seeming answer even if it can’t actually read the thing you’ve uploaded. The reason it’s so hard to get AI to stop hallucinating is that it’s permanently hallucinating. Its whole existence is one long lurid trip. Most of the time, the AI’s hallucinations bear a spooky resemblance to reality. But what they speak is the language of angels, in which, like the chirping of birds, there is neither truth nor lies.

The language of angels does a surprisingly good job at minor tasks like describing how hydroelectric dams work. When it comes to more complicated things, like human feelings, it flounders. All the weird metaphors and overheated rhetoric are bluffing, a great cloud of likely-seeming language, and if this homogeneously portentous cack feels empty or contradictory it’s because the machine has no earthly idea what’s going on or what it ought to say. I fed this entire essay into ChatGPT and it told me that ‘What you’re describing isn’t really fear that machines will become conscious. It’s disgust at the collapse of signal into texture.’ Drivel! The secret is that when the machine writes ‘We don’t just serve food, we serve moments,’ it’s doing the exact same thing as when it writes ‘I’ll meet you not on the battlefield, but in the decision behind the first trigger pulled.’ Absolutely all AI prose is filler, an expanding foam insulation made of words. LLMs will get better at many, many things. They do not seem to be getting better at this.

I don’t hate AI writing just because it’s nonsense. At some point, all interesting language has to reach down into the deep chasms of indetermination darkening beneath us. Any straightforwardly meaningful statement has to float on the surface of the meaningless like pond scum; poetry is when you stick your arm into the black swill beneath and stir it around. But there are different types of nonsense. Once I came across a middle-aged writer on this site who was chosen using AI to produce exactly two thirds of all his published material, which would lapse in and out of his own voice at random. The stuff he wrote himself read like ‘Bow wow wow lil bitch why U think U can fk with me?? Shootas shootas fk Ur a$$ UP.’ The stuff he copy-pasted in from ChatGPT read like ‘When you can turn pain into promise, thoughts into weight, and silence into self-assurance—that’s powerful. And honestly? It was a quiet revelation.’ Both of these are nonsense, but the first is much more alive. The author of the first passage might kill me: this is interesting. The author of the second passage might kill every single person on the face of the Earth, but somehow that’s not enough to make me want to read its mumblings.

Sometimes people like Richard Hanania argue that there’s no problem with AI writing, since it allows people who have interesting ideas but aren’t very good at writing to express themselves effectively. (Maybe it’s because I’m Jewish and he’s Palestinian, but whenever I see anything from Richard Hanania I’m seized by an overwhelming desire to demolish his house.) Wrong! People whose brains have been eaten by LLMs still maintain that ‘It’s not gradient, it’s texture’ or whatever is still their idea, expressed by the machine, but there is almost never any idea there at all. If your ideas were any good, you wouldn’t need to use the machine; as it stands your sub-literate scrawlings are the best thing about you. At least they’re yours.

But you people don’t listen. However bad a writer you think you are, you are not worse than AI. But you still keep letting it do your writing for you, as if I won’t be able to tell. Listen: I can tell. I can always tell. You think I won’t notice, but I will. There’s no hiding from me. If you let AI do your writing I will find out, and I will kill you.

Every so often people do get caught. Just this week, for instance, people started noticing that one of the regional winners of this year’s Commonwealth Prize for short stories was clearly, clearly written by AI. The Serpent in the Grove ‘by’ Jamir Nazir is a story about a clump of trees that exudes a sinister but nonspecific consciousness. It begins ‘They say the grove still hums at noon. Not the bees’ neat industry or the clean rasp of cutlass on vine, but a belly sound—as if the earth swallow

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