Writing, particularly creative or journalistic writing, is an infamously difficult, unsteady, and unfair way to try to make a living. This is in part because of the number of people who want to do it. For every actual paying job there are like a hundred thousand would-be writers, if not far more than that. Plenty of world-historically excellent writers have gone their whole adult lives without ever making a steady living off their writing; plenty of the best and hardest-working writers presently alive are not doing writing as their primary source of income, nor even as a regularly gainful supplement to their main job. If all else—pay, benefits, security, steadiness of work—were equal, the list of adults who would trade their existing career for a job in which their primary task was to write about things would have much of the human race on it.
This has been true for generations. Many people, when they hear someone say that they are a writer, go ahead and take for granted that what this actually means is "I'm unemployed" or, at best, "I am a substitute teacher." When young people tell their parents they want to study creative writing in college, or say that their career ambition is to be a writer, the words "BACKUP PLAN" flash in red neon in their parents' minds, accompanied by klaxon alarms. Any decent person who actually makes a living via writing will freely admit the crucial role that dumb luck has played in making that possible: either accidents of birth or accidents of opportunity have blessed them.
People write for free. People write things they will never show to another living soul, just for the sheer expressive fulfillment of writing them. People slave away at novels for years, for decades, with nothing but the faintest ludicrous hope that a professional editor might ever do more than glance at the manuscript before chucking it into the trash. People work full-time jobs, tend to their kids and pets, spend time with their partners, and then stay up all night writing Letterboxd movie reviews, because they have something inside of them that can come out no other way. People drive for Uber and Doordash, wait tables, substitute teach, for years and years, all for the flexibility to spend their free time pursuing opportunities to get paid a few cents a word for the thing they love doing the most in all the world. Forget about getting paid to write: People pay money to write, with neither hope nor intention of ever making their money back. People leap at opportunities to get paid in "exposure" for their writing. People send fully written articles to the Defector tips email inbox with notes like If you decide to run this, I don't care about getting paid, just make sure you don't use my real name in the byline or I'll get in trouble with the university where I work.
I have been making a living in writing—with one roughly year-long gap—for nearly 14 years, which is preposterous. Daily I am aware that, however good I have ever been or ever will be at writing, sheer happenstance will always deserve most of the credit for my having gotten over to this side of a colossal mountain range, the bottommost foothills of which many people will spend their entire lives scrambling up. Daily I am aware that this makes me maybe the most fortunate person in the world.
Writing—doing it, reading it, editing it, thinking about it—is what I do. It's how I think, and it's much of what I think about. That is kind of embarrassing to put out there: Many, many people are far better at writing—doing it, reading it, editing it, thinking about it—than I am, and I think I would feel a sort of sad internal cringe at hearing the 211,394,889th-best basketball player in the world be like Basketball is what I do and who I am. I have friends who are profoundly better writers than I am, whose writing abilities are to mine roughly what Mondo Duplantis's pole-vaulting skills are to those of your average toddler, who do not have writing jobs because there simply aren't any, and sometimes I feel ashamed even to look them in the eye.
But it's true, and it would be true even if I were a lot worse at writing; it was true when I was trying to be other kinds of guy and do other kinds of work for a living, and it's why I failed at all of them. I get paid to do it, which is nice, because I would be doing it anyway; doing it anyway is in large part how I blew the last non-writing job I ever had.
Nothing on earth could get me to outsource any part of the work of writing to an AI chatbot. That is not due to any great store of integrity or principle on my part; nor is it due to some great romantic love of writing, a craft that, as any editor of mine will have sussed out long ago, I clearly fucking despise. The reason is much dumber: Using an AI chatbot for assistance is simply incompatible with the most important stuff I hope (or need) to get out of writing anything. Using an AI chatbot to help me write would be like using the kitchen garbage disposal to help me eat dinner. The garbage disposal absolutely can do something like chewing and swallowing the food, faster and more efficiently than my jaws, tongue, teeth, and throat can do it. But if I have the garbage disposal do the chewing and swallowing for me, then I get none of the flavor or nutrition or satisfaction of eating food. I'm just making a big noisy show of wasting something I need.
I was thinking about this as I read a blog on the website Futurism on Thursday, in which the writer Maggie Harrison Dupré talks with the writer Kate Gilgan about accusations that the latter's Nov. 2025 essay for the New York Times's Modern Love series, "I Was Deemed Unfit to Be a Mother," was substantially created by or with the assistance of an AI chatbot.
Gilgan denies having used AI to write any part of the essay itself; "AI wasn't used to generate that content," she says, in phrasing seemingly purpose-built to make my pulse visible on my forehead. It's a claim that strains credulity if you read the essay in question, which after all was sloplike enough to draw those confident and credible accusations in the first place. Gilgan does cop to having used several AI chatbots for help with, in Harrison Dupré's wording, "conceptualizing and editing the piece." She'd wanted to get it published in the Modern Love column, Gilgan explains, for the sake of drawing interest to her book project, and she deployed the chatbots to digest previous entries in the series, detect patterns that would identify the tastes and sensibility of the series's editor, Dan Jones, and aid her in tailoring her essay accordingly.
In the Futurism blog, Gilgan seems not to appreciate how nastily cynical even that use of AI is. In her (dubious) version of events, she used the chatbots to, in essence, filter all the idiosyncratic style and voice out of the essay—to make it less expressive of the person nominally writing it than of the person she hoped would read and edit it.
Gilgan's defense is that this is not meaningfully different from having the piece edited by a person:
"One of the issues seems to be things around disclosure: 'How much was AI used? Did it generate content? My direct answer to that question is: no more so than an editor would generate content for me," Gilgan contended. "An editor is going to realistically rewrite a sentence or two for me. They're not going to insert a sentence into my piece, but they are going to rephrase. They're going to shift the wording. They're going to use some synonyms in there, that sort of thing. But they're not going to come up with a sentence all on their own. And it was the same with this."
Gilgan seems not to understand, or perhaps just hopes the reader will fail to apprehend, a crucial difference. A human editor makes changes to your piece, yes, but those changes are based on the editor's own thoughts about what will make its arguments stronger, its descriptions more vivid, its story more propulsive. That is, they're all pointed toward what will make it a better piece of writing. The AI, meanwhile—in particular as Gilgan claims to have used it—is explicitly making its changes on the basis of patterns it detects in other people's writing. To the extent an AI even can have any ideas about what makes a piece of writing better or worse (it can't), Gilgan's usage specifically strips out any possibility of it bringing those to bear on her essay. She's using the AI expressly to make her essay less original, for the purpose of gaming a system.
That the system happens to be based on one editor's tastes doesn't change the essential corruption in this approach. By intent, Gilgan (claims to have) used AI as an intercessor against her own voice, and as a replacement for her own creative and expressive choices. This is not all that meaningfully different from having had the AI straight-up generate the essay, from the prompt Write my story as though Dan Jones wrote it.
To the extent an AI can actually do what Gilgan is claiming, it can do that for literally any story, on behalf of literally anyone. In which case, why bother doing it at all? What good is producing this piece of writing—what good is having your name on it—if by design it reflects the amassed choices of other writers, scrubbed of much of their originality and idiosyncrasy by their passage through one editor's simulated tastes and then buffed into generic shapelessness through robotic aggregation?
I think I know Kate Gilgan's answer. I have a hunch, at any rate. The astounding, breathtaking thing is, this was an essay about the time she lost custody of her child. The idea of a person letting an AI chatbot tell them how to tell that story—of surrendering that story's expressive decision-making over to an automated triangulation of some stranger's editorial preferences; of letting a robot look over your shoulder and whisper in your ear while you tell the story of your own life—is bloodcurdling to me. What in the absolute hell are we even doing here.
An essential feature of art is that it allows us to encounter each others' unfathomable mystery. In that sense, if no other, "I Was Deemed Unfit to Be a Mother" is a fucking masterpiece: I don't understand it at all.
