A Rebuttal: Why I Refuse to Let AI Anywhere Near My Writing (and Why You Probably Should Too)

by T E Marts

Let me begin with a confession: I am a curmudgeon. I grumble at auto-correct, curse at spellcheck, and feel that the little red squiggly lines in Microsoft Word are less of a “helpful guide” and more of a shrill tattletale whispering, You spelled it wrong again, stupid. I am not what anyone would call a technological Luddite. When it comes to writing, yes, I believe in doing it myself, slowly, stubbornly, with mis-hit keys and all. And that is precisely why I refuse, utterly and proudly, to allow artificial intelligence into my creative work.

We are not merely flirting with AI anymore—we are swimming in it. It slides into our phones through predictive texting (which tries to finish my sentences… poorly), it masquerades as grammar improvement tools (hello, Grammarly, telling me I should change my perfectly good sentence into something beige), it suggests “smart replies” to emails (“Sounds great!” “Thanks!” “Let’s discuss!” Three soulless options for practically every occasion). And now, it is writing books? Articles? Speeches? Poems?

I say enough. I didn’t get into writing to manage an algorithm; I write because words are the last place where a man owns his thoughts and wrestles them into order on his own terms. If I must make typos: then by heaven, let them be my typos.

AI tools now cover every facet of the writing life. ChatGPT can write stories, entire college essays, and love letters at the push of a button. Sudowrite offers upgrades like “expander” and “shocker” to “improve” your story mid-scene. Jasper tries to co-author your marketing materials so you can generate “three times the content with one-third the effort.” Don’t even get me started on the AI art generators that produce fake book covers in seconds. Apparently, we’re expected to applaud all this as “progress.” But progress toward what, exactly? A world where originality is measured by how many prompts you can type into a box?

They tell me I’m being dramatic. That using AI is no different than using a calculator, a word processor, or a spellcheck. Rubbish. A calculator doesn’t think for me. It performs math faster than I care to. Spellcheck doesn’t compose sentences, it barks when it thinks I’ve made a mistake (which I often haven’t). These new engines aren’t passive aids; they are participants. Co-creators. Smug robots subtly replacing the heat and strain of effort with a cold and shapeless sludge of “content.”

And that’s the real horror of it all. Content. Once upon a time, writers created stories, essays, novels, articles; things with shape, intent, a pulse. Now everything is “content.” AI regurgitates it by the bucketful, filling the internet with plausible nonsense, serving up perfectly average blog posts, okayish fiction, and passable marketing copy like a relentless enemy army marching under a banner labeled “SEO.” Quantity has replaced quality. Volume drowns voice. If it’s fast and endless, it’s valued; if it’s slow and personal, it’s “inefficient.”

Well, sign me up for inefficiency, then.

This mania doesn’t just cheapen AI-generated work. It cheapens all work. When machines can spit out a decent draft in sixty seconds, what does that say to a writer who labored for six months, or six years, to craft something honest? It blurs the lines. Readers begin to distrust what they’re reading. Did a human bleed to produce this sentence, or did a bot stitch it together based on ten thousand internet samples? The emotional authenticity of human expression gets tossed into a grab-bag labeled “who knows anymore?”

The more AI infiltrates our tools, the more insidious it becomes. Microsoft Word now proudly offers AI rewriting suggestions. Google Docs blurts out predictive paragraphs. Canva designs logos and book covers “with AI.” Novelists use plotting bots to plan stories. Students use AI citation tools. The slow, deliberate art of creation is being replaced by canned cleverness, yet somehow we’re expected to be grateful, because it’s “saving us time.” My response: Time for what, exactly? If the goal of life is to fill it with shortcuts so we can get to the finish line faster, then why waste time living in the first place?

Everything about this new AI obsession screams rush. Rush the draft, rush the revisions, rush to publish, rush to market, rush to shovel more into the ever-hungry digital furnace. Meanwhile, the subtle edges of language grow duller. Our voices become echoes. The writer becomes a prompt jockey, sculpting vapor instead of carving stone.

I’ve heard the counterarguments; trust me, I’ve had every tech-friendly acquaintance point them out to me over coffee until I want to pour the hot liquid directly in my ears. They say AI is just a tool like any other. That only “amateurs” fear being replaced. That a real writer can use AI and still produce something “unique.” Maybe so. But I counter thus: a real writer doesn’t need AI to produce something unique. That uniqueness comes from struggle. If every mountain had an escalator to the top, reaching the summit would mean nothing.

So yes, I refuse. I refuse to let a machine suggest how I phrase my sentences. I refuse to let it decide my metaphors, choose my paragraph structure, or generate so-called “ideas.” If that makes me outdated, slow, or difficult, then so be it. I’ve never trusted the easy path. There is honor in the grind, in the redrafting and deleting, in the glorious, messy uncertainty of wondering if the sentence is good enough.

Those little red lines under my words, the ones that tell me I’ve misspelled something, forgotten a comma, or generally made a fool of myself? They irritate me beyond belief. But they keep me honest. They remind me that I am writing. I am responsible. They are nagging proof that I still have control, that it’s my brain and not some impersonal engine doing the work in my place. When I correct those mistakes manually, it’s an affirmation: the writing isn’t perfect because I am not perfect. And that’s the point.

I am not blind to the irony that someday this very rant might be used as “training data” for the next big AI model. Let it. I hope it chokes on my colons and bursts into flames over my deliberate refusal to expand my contractions. If refusing to bend to AI makes me a dinosaur, fossil me up, baby. You’ll find my bones clutched around a fountain pen.

At the end of all this, my plea to readers is simple: remember the value of difficulty. Remember the beauty of knowing someone sat for hours, days, weeks, chipping away at a paragraph until it finally said what they meant. Don’t let convenience fool you into accepting mediocrity as the new standard. Insist on books, essays, poems, and stories that bear the fingerprints, the flaws, the oddities, the voice of the human spirit.

Because when we let AI flood the world with words, we risk drowning the only voices that can truly speak to us: our own. So while the rest of the world rushes to embrace the algorithmic muse, I’ll keep my fingers on the keys, squint at the screen, curse at Word’s suggestions, and carve my stories by hand. It may take longer, it may not scale, and it sure as hell won’t keep pace with the content mills, but it will be mine. And that, dear reader, is a value no machine can replicate.