If you let AI do your writing, I will come to your house and kill you

Numb at the Lodge

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If you let AI do your writing, I will come to your house and kill you<br>Did you think I wouldn’t be able to tell? I can tell.

Sam Kriss<br>May 25, 2026

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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.<br>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.<br>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.<br>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...