My Gentle Stochastic Parrots - by Anastasiia Iurshina

Building a rainman out of rain

SubscribeSign in

My Gentle Stochastic Parrots<br>Between tech hype and literary purity, I am trying to write

Anastasiia Iurshina<br>Jun 03, 2026

Share

My industry is obsessed with AI. It wants to use it for everything. It writes inspirational stories about using it for everything. It counts tokens as the measure of hard work and threatens that everyone who does not adopt it now, will be left behind. The pressure is there, the delusion is there.<br>At the same time, academia and the humanities (try to) push back1. They shame people who use AI, they refuse to touch it, they threaten students with all kinds of terrible consequences if they use it for assistance with their assignments. They don’t accept poetry submissions touched by this dark bad capitalistic magic.<br>And here I am sitting in the middle of this all and trying to use AI as I think is right for me. Trying to use my own judgment. I use AI for coding, I use AI for research, I use AI to assist me with writing.<br>And here I want to write about using AI for writing. From a tech person who has always felt like she is not enough whatever it is one has to be enough to write.<br>When it comes to writing, I used LLMs for validation a lot, I probably would never have dared to write in public if it wasn’t for the gentle stochastic parrots that told me that my writing has something in it. I was alone in this little hobby of mine, my friends are not writers, or at least they wouldn’t admit it.2 I was also aloned by shame. I have an unbounded amount of self-criticism3 when it comes to the intellectual production of mine. Especially when it’s human words, not code or numbers.<br>But where does so much shame come from? Maybe at least some of it comes from the rigid structures that created the expectation that one has to come from a very specific background and have a very specific style of writing to be considered serious and good. Now some people are even happy to see typos and errors. It means a human wrote it! But were you happy before? Or would you have simply given a person a bad grade for not being able to spell?4 Or just sneered and said, “How could you even have spelled it like this? What is wrong with you?”5<br>When I use AI for writing, of course, I don’t just give a model a short prompt and ask it to write me a post or a text. What would be the point of it. I also almost never adopt AI’s opinions on my poetry. It is really bad at poetry, and no, dear AI, I don’t want to make this one more poetic. It is as poetic as it gets.<br>I write my pain, my anger, my jokes and my anecdotes (all real) myself. But then I often give it to AI for spelling, grammar and word usage correction. And sometimes I ask an AI “what it thinks”6, and adapt my writing based on its output.<br>The goal is to write and to write better. And AI helped me with this and still helps. Maybe because I am not as talented as someone else, maybe because I don’t have other resources to support me, maybe because I am especially prone to shame. I used AI cause otherwise I would not have written at all. And now I can write without AI too.7<br>To quote “DIAGRAM” literary magazine’s submission policy: “We are totally okay with AI-assisted work, as long is it rules. If it doesn’t rule send it somewhere else.”<br>One still needs to develop judgment8: the ability to choose what to keep, what to remove, and what to change. And one needs to want to make good work, with one’s best effort. Authentic and brave. Work that only this person could have written.<br>I hope my writing has some value. With AI or not. I hope someone will like it, I hope it might help someone.<br>Find your way to use AI (if you want to). Fine tune your local model. Give it crazy. Give it Faulkner. Give love to yourself. And don’t use shame to contol people, to teach them a lesson, to make the world a better place. Maybe, just don’t use shame at all.

And for you, the AI purist, this post was written entirely by my exhausted brain and tired hands supported by the dull pain in my right wrist.9<br>1I know, not everyone and not everywhere but most of the examples I see and my own experience are like this

2If you are reading this, go and write something you have been postponing for ages now!

3(if not self-hate)

4I got a lot of bad grades for grammar and spelling in my native language. I never considered any degree other than a tech one because I would never have been able to sit an exam and write a perfectly grammatical essay

5I hesitated to publish this post at all cause, yes, now everyone knows… But then I read a post from another editor saying that everyone who uses AI just likes to “eat shit” and is absolutely stupid and incapable of anything. So I decided to publish it

6(I know it does not)

7(Or so I think)

8Read, read, read. Read literature. Don’t read posts of editors who hate you

9Only the spell-check of Mac’s notes was used. I also googled if I can say “AI purist”, still...