The prestigious literary magazine Granta has recently been embroiled in an LLM writing controversy. The judges of the Commonwealth Foundation Short Story Prize awarded first prize to a story filled with LLM-writing tells, written by an author who supplied an AI-generated headshot. In response to the internet outcry, Granta published a rather embarrassing press release in which they quoted Claude (not an AI detection software) and denied that it was possible to know (or to investigate) whether they had been duped. Interestingly, the quoted Claude chat stated that there was likely a “human core” at the center of the slop story — a caveat that Granta presumably included as justification for their decision not to take the story down.
It’s a sentiment that I commonly see across social media. These days, we (aside from hardcore AI stans) pretty much agree that prompting a story or essay whole-cloth is poor form, or at the very least embarrassing. However, most people still say that AI is both permissible and useful for organizing ideas or editing. The implication is that, as long as there’s a “human core”, it’s okay to let the robot handle trivialities like the skillful deployment of language. They’re still your ideas…right?
This makes sense if your baseline assumption is that writing is no more than a means of information transfer. I have my knowledge and wisdom, fully formed in my head like the fetal Athena. I would like to blast this knowledge into your receptive little head with as little friction as possible. Sentences and paragraphs? No more than set dressing and lubrication, both of which an LLM is more than capable of producing.
Of course, this begs the question — why don’t you just send me your prompts? If your ideas can be fully conveyed in a list of bullet points, why not just send me bullet points?
Some might argue that indeed, abbreviated content is the best content. I recently had the great displeasure of sitting through a talk from a prominent physician who recommended that we all purchase subscriptions to Blinkist in order to consume more efficiently — wait for it — self-help and leadership books. But why exactly is she wrong? What’s the point of writing (and reading) longform in 2026?
I argue that this view of writing as merely a medium for communication misses the central advantage of writing as a cognitive technology. The value of writing lies almost entirely in writing as a process, not as a product.
We’ve all heard the story of how Socrates was suspicious of writing. In the Phaedrus, Plato records that Socrates believed writing atrophies the memory while giving only the illusion of understanding. I’ll grant that Socrates’s prodigious memory was a result of his hard-line anti-writing stance. But in response, I would challenge Socrates, the genius that he was, to work out a system of five equations without making any external marks.
The cognitive upgrade that we get from writing is this: we can externalize a thought, view it objectively, and respond to it. When we write, thought becomes a thing out in the world, a thing that can be analyzed, questioned, criticized, built upon or torn down. Once put down in writing, we no longer have to commit mental energy to holding that thought in our minds and we can devote all our resources to interacting with it. It’s a cybernetic upgrade — it’s an external tool that extends our mind. What’s more, in true cybernetic fashion, we can form a feedback loop with our writing, iteratively changing our writing and letting our writing change us.
Once a thought gains thing-hood through writing, we can use it as an island to launch explorations further from the shore of our current understanding. This extension of the boundaries of thought is most dramatically demonstrated in the realm of mathematical notation. As David Bessis notes in his book Mathematica, the question “What is 1,000,000,000 - 1?” would have been very difficult to answer for an ancient Roman to answer. Their number system did not allow for an operation like 1,000,000,000 - 1 = 999,999,999 — they would have to represent it as
\(\bar{\bar{M}} - \text{I} = \bar{\bar{M}}\bar{\bar{C}}\bar{\bar{M}}\bar{\bar{X}}\bar{\bar{C}}\bar{\bar{I}}\bar{\bar{X}}\bar{C}\bar{M}\bar{X}\bar{C}\bar{I}\bar{X}\text{CMXCIX} \)
Good external representation of concepts are essential to good thinking. Modern mathematics would not be conceivable without the externalization of concepts as symbols coupled with the subsequent manipulation of these symbols on paper. Each successive externalization creates a layer of compression and abstraction, opening up new complexities and new ways to interact with concepts.
Though less dramatic, I would argue that the same sort of process happens with prose writing. Writing, done properly, is an exploratory tool for thought, not just a tool for communication. Through the writing process, we build complexity, freshness and surprise.
Returning to fiction, in his book, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, Booker-prize winning author George Saunders (who has an excellent Substack) notes that the intelligence of great texts usually exceeds the intelligence of the authors, who — in comparison — seem naive, foolish, and small-minded. This is perhaps a legitimate critique of writing that Socrates could have made — writing is deceitful, because the author who speaks never lives up to the brilliance of author of the text.
But how is it possible to write something that is smarter than us? Saunders posits that it’s the process of iterative revision. You write, then you read what you wrote, then you respond to it and change it. You make a thousand different micro-decisions that slowly turn the “cruise ship” of your piece around. Over time, your writing sails in interesting new directions that you didn’t originally intend. The writer of the text isn’t you anymore — it’s a virtual “you” that is aggregated throughout time and space, with your best thinking amplified and your worst thinking sanded down. If you can form a cybernetic feedback loop with your writing, you can produce texts that exceed you.
This is why I believe that it is completely wrong-headed to ask an LLM to organize information for you or to edit your work. If you one-shot an essay from a list of ideas, the only thing you get back are those same ideas. You’re stuck in your local minimum forever and your only hope is to have random flashes of divine inspiration. In contrast, through an iterative writing practice, you can, with enough work, achieve exit velocity from the orbit of your preexisting ideas. Editing is the writing, writing is the thinking.
What does an iterative writing practice actually look like? It’s three simple steps, with a non-optional step 0.
Write something, anything. For fiction, you can start with anything: “A man went to the store”. For nonfiction, it’s easy to start with your preliminary thesis: “The rent is too damn high”. You can start with a single line, a stream of consciousness, or a tightly edited paragraph — it doesn’t matter.
Read it back, applying your taste. Saunders describes imagining a big meter attached to your forehead. On one side, painted green, it says Positive, and on the other, in bright red, it says Negative. You just have to watch how the needle bounces around when you read your lines.
For me, and for many aspiring writers, this is the most difficult part of the process. It requires that you read back your lines without feeling like they’re yours. You need to pretend that you’re a first-time reader who is sympathetic and open minded, but is ultimately critical and intolerant of poor quality writing. It’s easy to give yourself too many passes for sloppiness and it’s even easier to become hyper-critical and throw your laptop out the window before swearing to never write again. You need a finely developed level of mindfulness and emotional control to do it well.
For nonfiction, you also need to pay attention to more than just the Positive/Negative meter. You need to monitor for things like logical consistency, truth, and clarity.
If you have like-minded friends, you might solicit their advice. But be aware, this is in some ways breaking the cybernetic feedback loop. You’re introducing other peoples’ ideas directly, which might be a good or bad thing. Proceed with caution.
Ultimately, this step is all about listening to the text. What is it actually doing, as opposed to what you think it’s doing? Where does it want to go? Does every part of it actually do something, or are there superfluous pieces of the machine? This is the most important part of the process and can be trained independently in Step 0.
You can do this as an independent pass, preventing yourself from making any changes to the text. Saunders recommends this approach. In fact, he recommends printing out the whole draft on paper and marking with a pen. I think this is a very useful exercise, but as an impatient man, I usually do steps 2 and 3 together.
Change what you wrote, according to your taste. Find the spots where the needle bounced into the Negative zone, or for nonfiction, places where the logic doesn’t quite logic or your arguments become fuzzy. Now, (borrowing Saunders’ analogy again) flip through some alternatives and compare them like an optometrist flipping through lenses during an eye exam. Is it sharper or blurrier? Better or worse? Simply choose the better option. Render your changes onto the page, then repeat steps 2 and 3.
Note that this step doesn’t just involve changing things in-place. This is where you can choose to grow your piece or pare it down. If you started with a very short seed, then you will necessarily need to grow it. If you started with reams of stream-of-consciousness, you will necessarily need to pare it.
When do you stop? Whenever the meter stops going Negative, or whenever you feel like it. A blog post might not be worth spending too much time on. James Joyce continued to edit Ulysses ten years after publication.
The non-optional Step 0: Train your taste meter.
In the process outlined above, everything hinges on Step 2 where you apply your taste. You need to detect where your text is good and where it is bad.
(If you’re familiar with machine learning, our processes is similar to a generative adversarial network. We have one step where we generate text and another where we we detect its quality. Central to training GANs is making sure your generator and detector are both in working order.)
How do we improve our taste meter? By reading — slowly and carefully. When reading, apply the same taste-meter heuristics as you would when writing. This necessarily means that your reading speed will plummet, so choose your texts carefully — I mostly do this on re-reads of pieces I already like. George Saunders’ Story Club Substack is excellent if you want a guided tour of this close reading process. I recommend starting with his sequence of posts on Hemingway’s Cat in the Rain, which he takes apart paragraph by paragraph.
It’s also instructive to read texts that are not-so-good. You might read some amateur writers on reddit’s r/destructivereaders or some sub-par popular writers like Colleen Hoover or Ernest Cline. These can sharpen up the Negative parts of your Positive/Negative meter.
Again, this is a much different practice than reading for pleasure or information. This is reading for craft — it’s a slow process of mindful, careful listening. We start with a piece that we know we like (or we know is from a master writer) and we try to surface its normally subconscious effects.
I myself am only an amateur, beginning writer. I’ve never been published outside of a school magazine (which published all submissions). However, I still feel like I’ve benefited much from iterative writing practice. When drafting blog posts or working on scientific manuscripts, I find that I discover new and interesting ideas when I edit carefully and iteratively. I have no doubt that these insights will only improve in quality and frequency as I continue to practice writing.
Even more importantly, my appreciation and enjoyment of good writing has greatly increased. By slowly sharpening up my taste-meter through editing my own text or studying others’, I’ve developed the ability to appreciate the work of great masters who didn’t used to catch my attention. Recently, I’ve found myself moved by the subtle emotion in Jorge Luis Borges’ prose — a writer who I had previously classified as a writer of ideas and an uninteresting stylist.
I encourage you to give it a shot. Just start with something simple and meaningless like “A man went to the store.” A few revisions later and you’ll find that you’ve grown it into “Arthur Shepherd, a clerk of now middling age, reluctantly walked to the used shoe store”. Keep editing and you’ll have a little story in no time.
And by God, don’t ask a robot to do it for you.