Against AI Prose

In C.S. Lewis’s Till We Have Faces, Queen Orual writes the story of her life to indict the gods. “Being, for all these reasons, free from fear, I will write in this book what no one who has happiness would dare to write. I accuse the gods, especially the god who lives on the Grey Mountain.” The gods have been unjust, Orual believes; the story of her life is her complaint. In Part Two of the novel, Orual presents her case before the gods and receives their just judgement. As she does so, all of her self-righteousness falls away; the reader realizes that Orual’s hatred is its own indictment. Articulating her complaint with nothing left to hide behind allows Orual to see herself most clearly.

Till We Have Faces is Lewis’s final novel and the one he called his best book. It is a beautiful story. It is also an excellent depiction of what writing is really all about. Fr. Andrew Lazo argues that Lewis is always writing his autobiography—he did so in “Early Prose Joy,” most self-consciously in Surprised by Joy, and, Lazo’s argument goes, most clearly in Till We Have Faces. Writing, Lewis illustrates, is a process whereby we learn what we have to say and to say it clearly. It is a revelation of the self; it stands upon all previously read and written material. It is through writing that we speak into the literary conversation that transcends particular times and places.

Writing faces a new threat in 2026. AI has gotten better; it can generate wordcounts previously unthinkable. And, while it still hallucinates, generative AI can pull quotes, format footnotes, and write copy in a far more impressive way than it could just a year ago.

I actually recommend using AI to write a few articles about something you know about. The content isn’t really important, the style is. Once you’ve read enough content that you KNOW is AI-generated, you’ll start seeing the tells EVERYWHERE.

For example, the paragraph above was written by me, with no assistance. The paragraph that follows was written using chatgpt with the following prompt: “In no more than 5 sentences, discuss using known AI-generated content to learn to recognize other AI-generated content.”

Using known AI-generated content as training material can sharpen pattern recognition, like tuning your ear by replaying a familiar riff until you catch every note. You start to notice telltale fingerprints such as overly balanced phrasing, subtle repetition, or a certain “polished but hollow” cadence. But it’s a double-edged blade: as models evolve, they shed those quirks, making yesterday’s tells obsolete. There’s also a risk of overfitting, where you see “AI ghosts” in perfectly human writing. So it works best as one tool in a broader kit, not a silver bullet detector.

Back to me: it’s hilarious that even in the AI generated paragraph, theres’ overly balanced phrasing and that telltale “polished but hollow” cadence.

I am not against AI. I have implemented it and used it in a medical setting, and it has been extremely useful and productive. (Not used for primary diagnosis, but for workflow streamlining and efficiency)

And I believe AI is an excellent tool for searching the Internet for content.

But I also see many pitfalls. The use of AI to generate content, particularly in the political setting is going to be very dangerous, as people are very vulnerable to visual data that may be used to mislead them, as in propaganda purposes. That old saw about the lie making it halfway around the world before the truth gets its trousers on is a very apt reference.

Reading AI generated text, as you folks have pointed out, does have "tells"...you can kind of smell it, even if you can't quite put your finger on it, so that doesn't concern me at this time.

That said, I had a rather disorienting experience with AI recently which has had me turning some things over in my head. I love music, and in particular, love Jazz, especially classic Jazz, particularly the old masters such as Coleman Hawkins, Ben Webster, John Coltrane, etc.

A Freeper sent me a link a week or two ago to some very mellow, sax-based Jazz, quartet style, and it was a long playlist on YouTube. I enjoyed it a great deal, because it is exactly like a lot of that Jazz I especially appreciate, and when I looked at the playlist in detail....it was wholly AI generated.

I really enjoyed it. But the more I thought of it, the more the analog, human side of me rebelled against it. I like it, it is very nice to listen to, and...I am not averse to listening to various types of mass produced music, especially as background music.

Here is a link:

LINK: Sepia Lounge Jazz-Let the Day Drift (Vintage Noir Jazz for Lazy Weekends)

I know I am resisting it because it was not created by an analog human process, and I am a bit of a purist about this kind of thing in many areas, and I see it as something to be addressed as a personal shortcoming of mine with respect to AI. Heh, I still use a manually wound Rolex I purchased as a 19 year old sailor in the Ship's Store aboard the USS JFK back in 1978 because...it is analog!

But I think the thing that bothers me is the off-loading or...the abdication of the creative process by using AI to "offload" the process completely. Sure, you probably have to enter parameters in the AI tool to tell it what you are looking to create, and that takes some know-how.

After listening to it for some time before knowing it was AI generated, I thought it was really great that this was the kind of of Jazz I really loved, and here it was, all on this playlist. And I realized...I don't know any of these songs. Who put this together? I don't have an encyclopedic knowledge of Jazz like some do, so perhaps I have not heard these, otherwise, I probably would have recognized the phrasing of the saxophone or a number of other characteristics besides the melody.

When I found it was all completely AI Generated, I was a bit dumbfounded. I couldn't put my finger on it.

But you know what it made me feel like? Have you ever seen the movie "Ex Machina"? Basically, a guy is selected by lottery in his company by his Elon Musk kind of CEO (who founded and ran that company for AI machines that would be indistinguishable from humans) as a test to visit his remote estate and view his newest creations. Of course, it is a female android, and even though the guy knows it is a machine (because even though the AI personality is largely perfected, the physical aspect of the body as a machine can still be seen) he begins to develop an emotional relationship with the machine.

Of course, there is a darker side to all this, and the guy comes to realize that he didn't really win a "lottery" at his workplace, he was hand picked by the boss, and the machine had been developed to appeal directly to him, the result of an online pornography profile that had been compiled on him, so he was easy pickings.

That is kind of the weird feeling when I thought about why all this music appealed directly to me. Not only was it created by AI, the characteristics of the music had probably been calculated by AI to appeal to a very wide range of Jazz listeners.

Heh, I want to stress-I don't dislike the music itself. I really like it. But I was quite unsettled by the likely process of how it was created, and haven't come to terms with it yet.

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