Writing is hard. For Franz Kafka, putting words on the page was a process of „unending torments”. George Orwell said it felt like „a long bout of some painful illness”. Hunter S. Thompson, a journalist, saw it as the opposite of sex: „only good when it’s over”. Now AI has come to the rescue. Large language models (LLMs) eagerly offer reams of text without any pain or torment. Bots can spew out emails (excellently), longer prose (passably) and poetry (poorly). To them, writer’s block is a 500-sheet pack of paper: any user of an LLM can produce as many words in a day as Kafka did in his life.
For human writers this is a blessing and a curse. If you claim to be an author but use AI, you look like a fraud—bot-busting tools like Pangram are good at spotting when someone has had an AI helping hand. Take the hundreds of people who have used LLMs to write applications for The Economist’s internships, or the government ministers who have submitted AI-generated works to our By Invitation column (it’s tempting, but we won’t name them).
De redactie van NRC selecteert de beste artikelen uit The Economist voor een breder perspectief op internationale politiek en economie.
Our investigation of the stylistic quirks of the big bots reveals how, with every update, AI writing is getting closer to human writing. We compared the outputs of LLMs to prose we know is produced by humans: our own. We asked 14 variants of ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Grok released since 2024 to write versions of our articles without consulting the web. We compared our corpus across 55,940 sentences and 1.2m words, and checked our results against other newspapers and hit fiction books. We found that some of AI’s former tricks—using lots of em-dashes, for instance, or words like „leveraging”—are no longer leveraged much in its writing.
