26 Articles about AI & Writing

Wikipedia’s guide to spotting AI writing has become a manual for hiding it. – ArsTechnica

Lit bots beware: AI creative writing faces reader skepticism, study shows- PhysOrg

Would you use AI to break writer’s block? We asked 5 experts – The Conversation

I had ChatGPT write my resume, LinkedIn Summary and cover letter — then asked Gemini if I would get the job – Tom’s Guide 

Funders ‘should support shared AI tools for translational research’ – Research Professional News 

Fine-Grained Detection of AI-Generated Writing in the Biomedical Literature – BioRxiv 

Visualizing poetry with deep semantic understanding and consistency evaluation - Nature

How to Spot AI Hallucinations Like a Reference Librarian – Card Catalog for Life

Researchers who use generative AI to write papers are publishing more – Chemical & Engineering News  

In 2026, AI will outwrite humans - Harvard’s Nieman Lab 

Why Does A.I. Write Like … That? – New York Times 

Don’t Let AI Ruin the Em Dash – Wall Street Journal  

What are the clues that ChatGPT wrote something? – Washington Post  

AI is writing about half of the articles on the internet - Axios  

America is in a literacy crisis. Is AI the solution or part of the problem? - CNN 

10 Ways AI Is Ruining Your Students’ Writing – Chronicle of Higher Ed

Stop AI-Shaming Our Precious, Kindly Em Dashes—Please - The Ringer

A researcher’s view on using AI to become a better writer – The Hechinger Report 

Beyond ‘we used ChatGPT’: a new way to declare AI in research - Research Professional News  

AI tool detects LLM-generated text in research papers and peer reviews – Nature

An Ancient Answer to AI-Generated Writing – Inside Higher Ed

My students compared my writing against ChatGPT – and they all preferred the AI – The Independent  

Trump admin reportedly plans to use AI to write federal regulations - Engadget

Can researchers stop AI making up citations? – Nature 

’Stranger Things’ Creators Accused by Fans of Using AI To Write Series Finale - Vice  

Writing Labs are an Answer to AI – Inside Higher Ed

Making us Average

A.I. is a technology of averages: large language models are trained to spot patterns across vast tracts of data; the answers they produce tend toward consensus, both in the quality of the writing, which is often riddled with clichés and banalities, and in the caliber of the ideas. Other, older technologies have aided and perhaps enfeebled writers, of course—one could say the same about, say, SparkNotes or a computer keyboard. But with A.I. we’re so thoroughly able to outsource our thinking that it makes us more average, too. - Kyle Chayka writing in the New Yorker

Generative AI Doesn't Know How to Write Suspense

Suspense, in some form, is what keeps people watching anything longer than a TikTok clip, and it’s where A.I. flounders. A writer, uniquely, can juggle the big picture and the small one, shift between the 30,000-foot view and the three-foot view, build an emotional arc across multiple acts, plant premonitory details that pay off only much later and track what the audience knows against what the characters know. A recent study found that large language models simply couldn’t tell how suspenseful readers would find a piece of writing. -New York Times

Studying AI Writing

Just as young artists learn to paint by copying masterpieces in museums, students might learn to write better by copying good writing. One researcher suggests that students ask ChatGPT to write a sample essay that meets their teacher’s assignment and grading criteria. The next step is key. If students pretend it’s their own piece and submit it, that’s cheating. They’ve also offloaded cognitive work to technology and haven’t learned anything. But the AI essay can be an effective teaching tool, in theory, if students study the arguments, organizational structure, sentence construction and vocabulary before writing a new draft in their own words. -Hechinger Report

AI Writing Feedback

Students would generally learn more if they wrote a first draft on their own. With some prompting, a chatbot could then provide immediate writing feedback targeted to each students’ needs. In surveys, students with AI feedback said they felt more motivated to rewrite than those who didn’t get feedback. That motivation is critical. Often students aren’t in the mood to rewrite, and without revisions, students can’t become better writers. It’s unclear how many rounds of AI feedback it would take to boost a student’s writing skills more permanently, not just help revise the essay at hand. Studies (have found) that delaying AI a bit, after some initial thinking and drafting, could be a sweet spot in learning. -Hechinger Report

20 Articles about AI & Writing

A researcher’s view on using AI to become a better writer – Hechinger Report  

GEO for PR - MuchRack 

The AI cheating panic is missing the point - The Washington Post  

What counts as plagiarism? AI-generated papers pose new risks – Nature

AI Writing Disclosures Are a Joke. Here’s How to Improve Them. – Chronicle of Higher Ed

Meet the early-adopter judges using AI – MIT Tech Review

One-fifth of computer science papers may include AI content – Science.org  

Students Are Using ChatGPT to Write Their Personal Essays Now – Chronicle of Higher Ed 

Wikipedia Editors Adopt ‘Speedy Deletion’ Policy for AI Slop Articles – 404 Media

The rise of AI tools that write about you when you die – Washington Post

Springer Nature launches new tool to spot awkward, tortured phrases – Chemistry World 

The Biggest Signs That AI Wrote a Paper, According to a Professor - Gizmodo

AI is flattening language — and redistributing power – UX Design

I Teach Creative Writing. This Is What A.I. Is Doing to Students. – New York Times

ChatGPT Is Changing the Words We Use in Conversation – Scientific American

I am no longer chairing defenses or joining committees where students use generative AI for their writing – Stat Modeling

454 Hints That a Chatbot Wrote Part of a Biomedical Researcher’s Paper – New  York Times

Duke Just Introduced An Essay Question About AI—Here’s How To Tackle It - Forbes

AI Writing Disclosures Are a Joke. Here’s How to Improve Them. - Chronicle of Higher Ed 

I Tested Three AI Essay-Writing Tools, and Here’s What I Found – Life Hacker

An electric charge in words

The poet W. S. Merwin once said that you know you are writing a poem when a “sequence of words starts giving off what you might describe as a kind of electric charge.” I’ve been thinking about how to place the sort of liveness Merwin describes—the sense of your body as a living circuit that the poem moves through—in a world filling up with noise, marred by misdirection and distraction. When, how, and why do we make room for the miraculous? From moment to moment. In any way we can. Because it is part of the practice of being human. -Joshua Bennett is the Distinguished Chair of the Humanities and a literature professor at MIT writing in The Atlantic

AI Writing Results

We depend on a calculator to produce identical results no matter who uses it, but identical results in a writing context are boring at best. At worst, these identical AI results amount to an insidious reproduction of the tropes and stereotypes present in the source text. -LitHub

Using AI to Flesh Out Half-Baked Ideas

I’ve always found it easier to work out my ideas through dialogue, but not many people are interested in hearing my half-baked ideas. That is why I’ve found that talking through ideas is one of the best uses of AI for writers. NotebookLM takes the idea of talking to the archive to the next level: The archive you chat with is one you assemble yourself with sources for a particular project, which the AI can also help you collect to get started. -Jonathan D. Fitzgerald on Mashable 

The fear that AI will Flatten Everything

I understand the fear that AI will flatten everything — our voices, our culture, even our humanity. It’s a genuine concern. When algorithms prioritize patterns over personality, the result can be unnervingly uniform. Language becomes smooth but soulless. Distinctiveness gets edited out. And yet — I don’t believe the story ends there. History tells us something else: that when more people can express themselves, culture expands. The spectrum widens. And over time, we find new ways to value voice, not just polish. Yes, we’ll have to work harder to preserve individuality. To notice when we’re defaulting to the safe or generic. -Youjin Nam writing in Medium

For the Scholarly Elite or the Masses?

In college and graduate school, I studied cognitive science, philosophy, and politics. I formed a conviction that I wanted to try to change the world for the better. Initially, my plan was to be an academic and public intellectual. At the time, I got bored easily (still do), which made me distractible and not great at making the trains run on time. Academia seemed like an environment that would keep me perpetually stimulated as I would think and write on the value of compassion, self-development, and the pursuit of wisdom. I would hopefully inspire others to implement these ideas to form a nobler society.

But graduate school, while stimulating, turned out to be grounded in a culture and incentive scheme that promoted hyperspecialization; I discovered that academics end up writing for a scholarly elite of typically about fifty people. It turned out there was not much support for academics who would attempt to spread ideas to the masses. So my aspiration to have a broad impact on potentially millions of people clashed with the market realities of academia. 

I adopted my career orientation. My new aim was to try to promote the workings of a good society via entrepreneurship and technology.

Reid Hoffman and Ben Casnocha, The Startup of You

27 Recent Articles about AI & Writing

AI has rendered traditional writing skills obsolete. Education needs to adapt. - Brookings

Disclosing generative AI use for writing assistance should be voluntary – Sage Publishing

California colleges spend millions to catch plagiarism and AI. Is the faulty tech worth it? - Cal Matters

Losing Our Voice: The Human Cost of AI-Driven Language – LA Magazine

A.I. Is Poised to Rewrite History. Literally. – New York Times

University of Limerick to investigate how AI text was part of book written by senior academic – Irish Examiner

As SEO Falls Apart, the Attention Economy Is Coming For You - INC 

Authors Are Posting TikToks to Protest AI Use in Writing—and to Prove They Aren’t Doing It – Wired  

I love this ChatGPT custom setting for writing — but it makes AI nearly undetectable – Tom’s Guide

AI can’t have my em dash – Salon

We asked 5 AI helpers to write tough emails. One was a clear winner. – Washington Post

Will Writing Survive A.I.? This Media Company Is Betting on It. – New York Times

Students Are Humanizing Their Writing—By Putting It Through AI – Wall Street Journal

Why misuse of generative AI is worse than plagiarism – Springer

The Great Language Flattening is underway—AI chatbots will begin influencing human language and not the other way around – The Atlantic

Tips to Tell Whether Something Was Written With AI – CNET

Is this AI or a journalist? Research reveals stylistic differences in news articles – Techxplore

Some people think AI writing has a tell — the em dash. Writers disagree. – Washington Post

LinkedIn CEO says AI writing assistant is not as popular as expected  - Tech Crunch

What happens when you use ChatGPT to write an essay? See what new study found. – USA Today

How AI Helps Our Students Deepen Their Writing (Yes, Really) – EdWeek

The Washington Post is planning to let amateur writers submit columns — with the help of AI – The Verge

Federal court says copyrighted books are fair use for AI training - Washington Post

Can academics use AI to write journal papers? What the guidelines say – The Conversation

I write novels and build AI. The real story is more complicated than either side admits – Fast Company

How to Detect AI Writing: Tips and Tricks to Tell if Something Is Written With AI – CNET

I Wrote a Novel About a Woman Building an AI Lover. Here’s What I Learned. – Wall Street Journal

Grammarly Offering Authorship Tool

Grammarly has created a new authorship tool. It tracks the writing process, showing where text is typed into a document or pasted, as well as which parts of a document are created or modified with AI. When the paper is complete, a report is generated, which students can show teachers if there is any question about the source of their work. -Wall Street Journal 

Emotional Support Punctuation

“The em dash is such a powerful writing tool that also carries great subtlety to it,” said Aileen Gallagher, a journalism professor at Syracuse University. “The idea that it is an indicator of soulless, dead AI-generated writing is really upsetting to me. Moniza Hossain, a children’s author based in Britain, called the em dash her “emotional support punctuation mark.” -Washington Post

24 Recent Articles about AI & Writing

Independent says readers ‘often prefer’ stories provided by new AI service to human-written versions of those articles– Press Gazette 

Why AI can’t take over creative writing – The Conversation  

NaNoWriMo shut down after AI, content moderation scandals – TechCrunch

The best AI email writing assistant: We tested 5, and only one beats a human - The Washington Post

Researchers surprised to find less-educated areas adopting AI writing tools faster - Ars Technica

ChatGPT firm reveals AI model that is ‘good at creative writing’ – The Guardian

OpenAI’s ‘creative writing’ AI evokes that annoying kid from high school fiction club - TechCrunch

AI Search Has A Citation Problem – Columbia Journalism Review

Break through writer’s block with an AI-powered creativity hack – Mashable

What is interesting writing and can LLMs create it? – Stat Modeling

AI Anxiety Can writing at Harvard coexist with new technologies? – Harvard Magazine

Hollywood writers say AI is ripping off their work. They want studios to sue – LA Times

Is There A Place For AI In Creative Writing? – Caversham Writers

AI won't remove the need for human editing – Times Higher Ed

New AI tool could redefine book charts and bestseller lists – Jerusalem Post  

Dow Jones negotiates AI usage agreements with nearly 4,000 news publishers – Harvard’s Nieman Lab  

Springer Nature reveals AI-driven tool to 'automate some editorial quality checks' – The Bookseller

Low quality books that appear to be AI generated are making their way into public libraries – 404 Media

Every doctor is a writer: On the end of note-writing and meaning-making in medicine – Stat News

University students describe how they adopt AI for writing and research in a general education course – Nature  

Meta Is Experimenting With AI-Generated Comments, for Some Reason – Life Hacker

Writers respond to the short story written by AI – The Guardian  

People say they prefer stories written by humans over AI-generated works, yet new study suggests that’s not quite true – The Conversation  

How Scottsdale police are using AI to help write crime reports – Arizona’s Family  

13 Ways to Spot AI Writing

Tips for determining if an article is likely written by AI.

OVERUSED WORDS. AI-written articles tend to come back to the same terms multiple times. Examples would be comprehensive, delve, meticulous, versatile and pivotal. Before 2024, overused AI words in scientific research papers were typically nouns. More recently, researchers say AI excessively uses "style" words—mostly verbs and some adjectives. The phrases AI picks up can often make the text sound more like marketing material than academic scholarship or quality news writing.

TORTURED ACRONYMS. Generative AI will sometimes pick up the wrong words for an acronym. For instance, a data science paper might use "CNN" to refer to "convolutional brain organization" instead of "convolutional neural network.”

NONSENSICAL PARAPHRASES. An academic paper written by AI might have “glucose bigotry” instead of “glucose intolerance,” where it changed a single word and did not recognize the context.  

ACADEMIC CITATIONS. AI-written articles with academic citations have been known to include incorrect or incomplete references. AI writing has been also known to take quotations out of quotation marks, paraphrase them, and delete the citation.

STYLE CHANGES. A sudden change in writing style within an article or essay may indicate that the author’s work was rewritten using AI.

PERFECT GRAMMAR. A typo, particularly in student writing, could indicate the article or essay is not wholly the work of a bot. Mistake-free writing is, ironically, a red flag. However, savvy writing prompts may ask the AI to include some errors in order to mislead inspectors.

MECHANICAL STYLING. AI tends to mechanically repeat expressions that appear often in the internet material that it was trained on. The result is often uninspired and generic prose that often lacks any specific point. 

ARTICLES. AI will make errors in the use of definite and indefinite articles, often because it does not recognize the context to determine whether an article is required and which one. For example, AI editors will often fail to use the definite article before common nouns such as “participants” and “results” when referring to a study.  “Results show that…” is a general reference while “The results show that…” are those of the present study. Generative AI will miss this distinction.

SUBJECT-VERB AGREEMENT. AI often fumbles subject-verb agreement when the verb does not immediately proceed the verb. 

VERB TENSE. Generative AI will confuse when to use past tense and present tense.

LINKING WORDS. AI editors tend to delete words linking sentences and paragraphs, such as “however,” “therefore,” “in contrast,” and “moreover.”

ARCHAIC LANGUAGE. Since older texts from the early twentieth have been more available to use as training data sets for LLMs than current writing samples, some researchers have found overuse of words that were popular then but have since fallen out of common usage as evidence of generative AI.  

PREDICTABILITY. Text is more likely to be human than AI when it includes sarcasm, current pop-references or insults the reader. Writing that doesn't match predictable patterns is more likely to be human generated.

 More about spotting fake news

The Top 7 Chatbots for Writing

ChatGPT

Trained on the most data so it is the most powerful overall AI. Faster than other chatbots and can answer more difficult, complex questions than many other chatbots with better memory. Processes up to 25K words and can use both images and text as inputs. It doesn’t do sourcing and does not pull from the most recent info. Can browse the internet with Bing. Performed faster than other chatbots in tests, offering more-thorough answers, and answers more-difficult, complex questions. The advance voice mode makes it easy to chat with while you are on the go, making it a useful replacement for search quires. There’s a feature that allows users to customize the tone and voice to their own style of writing. There is a limited free version or pay $20 a month for ChatGPT Plus.  

Perplexity AI

A good research option among the generative AI tools when accuracy is critical. It acts like a search engine but includes results from the web (unlike ChatGPT).Automatically shows where the information came from, so it’s more reliable than ChatGPT. Users can specify where they want the information to be drawn from among a few categories such as academic sources or YouTube. Users can also upload documents as sources and ask it to rewrite prompts. It suggests follow-up questions you might not have considered. Less useful for creative writing. In tests, it was better at summarizing passages, providing information on current events and do coding better than other chatbots. Unmatched speed and accuracy in processing millions of data makes it very useful to data scientists for advanced predictive models. The free plan allows 3 pro searches every four hours. Video tutorial here.

ChatSonic

Created by WriteSonic built on top of the same technology that powers ChatGPT. Can assume personas such as a philosopher or stand-up comic. Create up to 100 AI-generated images each month for free. Connected to the internet, so it can provide real-time, up-to-date answers, which ChatGPT cannot do. Free.

Claude

Writing, coding, in-depth analysis AI. Designed to be inoffensive. Like ChatGPT, it can act on text or uploaded files. Useful for summarizing long transcripts, clarifying complex writings, and generating lists of ideas and questions. Can analyze huge documents, up to 75K words at a time. In tests, it is more conversational, gives direct answers, sometimes links to sources, and offers better creative writing suggestions than other chatbots but can be slower. It can mimic your writing style and users have the option of three presets: formal style, concise, or explanatory style. Trained on the AP Stylebook. Free plan allows up to 40 messages a day.

Gemini

Google claims this large language model is better at math, coding and other tasks than many other programs. It provides real time responses with the help of Google’s search engine. Besides text, it can take commands that come as videos, images, voice and code. It has access to more timely and updated information than ChatGPT. Gemini Advanced costs $20 a month after the trial period ends.

Jasper AI

AI story writing tool for fiction and nonfiction. Pick a tone of voice for style. Pre-built templates available. A more business-focused AI that is particularly helpful for advertising and marketing. Remembers past queries, However, no sources are provided and limited to pre-2022 information. Short free trial. $29 month.

Poe (Platform for Open Exploration)

Created by Quora, this AI lets users create a personalized chatbot using one of 70 bots (such as OpenAI or Anthropic). Poe lets you compare and contrast models to find the right fit for your specific need in any given moment. (Poe doesn't have its own large language model.) Free.

AI Text Tools for Everyday

ChatGPT for quick inquiries

Claude as an everyday workhorse

Perplexity for research

NotebookLM to condense large amounts of information

Infography.in for text to infographics

Napkin AI to convert text into visuals and charts.

More AI Tools

AI Writing & Old Language

Because of copyright restrictions, the training data sets for LLMs are largely restricted to old texts from the early twentieth century. As a result, some researchers have used the frequency of certain words that were popular then but have since fallen out of common parlance as evidence of generative AI. from The-Scientist

Will Human-generated Content Maintain its Value?

Multiple times daily, I find myself silently asking, Did you really write this or did AI? Just like handwritten notes have decreased over time, human-generated content will also decrease over time, but it will maintain its value—because we hunger to be heard and cared for by another human. However, unlike handwritten notes, it will be harder to distinguish between AI-generated content and human-generated content. - Tara Chklovski writing in Fast Company

Abstracts Written by AI

While many academics may scorn the idea of outsourcing article summaries to generative AI, a new investigation by researchers at Ontario’s University of Waterloo found peer reviewers rated abstracts written by humans—but paraphrased using generative AI—far more highly than those authored without algorithmic assistance. -Inside Higher Ed