Bots Write Badly, But Some Humans Write Worse

If you read AI-written fiction, you might think the whole world revolves around cutlery. Voices slice through sweetness like blades. A lover's approval is a blade wrapped in silk. Glances, pauses, and even indigestion are as sharp as a knife. When things aren't sharp, they are heavy, like tears, casual words, a knock, or a handful of cash. And everything blooms: silence, gratitude, and even the taste of blood.

Take Shy Girl, a dark horror novel that seems to belong in Wattpad and is caught in the crosshairs of a scandal in publishing for allegedly using AI. As easy as it is to hate on these kinds of novels, it's also easy to hate on AI writing. But human writers shouldn't celebrate their own intellectual superiority too early. For literary traditionalists, the wave of synthetic storytelling is still a threat.

The plot of Shy Girl is bizarre (everything I know about it is against my will). It's about a gritty tale of a woman forced by a kidnapper to live and act like a dog. Originally self-published, the book generated so much hype that Hachette, a publishing titan, picked it up. It hit bookshops in November until it was pulled out: a group of internet vigilantes, armed with bot-detecting software, cried foul and pointed out signs of machine intervention. Readers felt budol-ed into buying an AI good. The publisher pulled the book. The author, Mia Ballard, insisted that she never used AI and blamed her early editor instead.

What does AI prose actually sound like?

When large language models (LLMs) try to write creatively, the results is a strange mix of dullness and melodrama. It tries to be subtle, but every minor detail is a prophecy of doom.

Just like the prose in Shy Girl, AI written text uses exhausting and repetitive metaphors. It likes to mix words together that could make sense in theory, but feels wrong to the ear. Then there's the rhythm. AI-writing have a peculiar addiction to verbless, staccato sentences. With very few words. Or sometimes. Just. One. They also can't resist grouping adjectives and clauses into neat little triads, reliably churning out descriptions like: "I'm careless, disorganised, not worth the effort." For what it's worth though, I also love writing into neat little triads. Should I change how I originally write for fear of being wrongfully accused of using AI with my writing? I digress, that's a topic for another blog.

Can AI ever possess a literary soul?

For purists, these stylistic quirks are proof of a deep and metaphysical void. Because a machine has no personal history, no working taste buds, and no capacity for heartbreak, it can never develop an authentic voice. How can an algorithm understand human longing when it has never missed a train, fallen in love, or endured the suffocating, gridlocked heat of a Friday night rush hour?

For a human, writing is an act of relentless decision-making. Every word and sentence is a deliberate choice, born from personal freedom and lived experience. Great literature works as a bridge between minds, reimagining the world while capturing something universally human. A computer cannot replicate that connection. It has some very impressive math, sure, but not a soul.

Are we romanticising our own average output?

This sounds very romantic, but it ignores one truth: so much of human writing, or human art in general, are terrible.

If you pit AI against Nabokov, the machine is as eloquent as a microwave. Compare that same AI to a random self published Wattpad story or formulaic airport thriller and suddenly the bot holds its own.

Critics complain that AI writing is purely derivative, but that's practically the business model of the commercial book trade as well. Publishers love marketing debut authors as the second coming of an established one, or how a new novel is a cross between two previous bestsellers.

The saga of Shy Girl proves the point. If you check the online reviews, plenty of readers genuinely enjoyed it. While some readers were furious about the undeclared AI involvement, many simply don't give a damn.

In fact, the romance genre is already adapting to this shift. A growing number of writers openly use AI to handle the heavy lifting of genre tropes, from enemies to lovers to age gap romances, skipping the tedious parts of drafting. Additionally, today's writing AI are just beginners, they're still learning and learning at a frightening pace. At some point, everyday readers can demand custom-made fiction tailored to their exact preferences, much like fussy brats demanding bedtime stories about the family cat.

How are traditional authors fighting back?

Will human writers survive? Oh for sure. The brilliant ones, at least.

A computer might process millions of data points, but it will likely never dream up of a metaphor as perfect as Macbeth's "dusty death" or his "last syllable of recorded time." It's hard to imagine a server farm ever producing a line of sorrow as simple and shattering as King Lear mourning his murdered daughter: "Never, never, never, never, never."

But, just like in music, film, and the visual arts, the real question isn't simply whether a top-tier human can outperform a machine. Even if human genius remains unmatched, will average readers be willing to pay a premium for old-school handcrafted prose? And will there be enough of those paying readers left to keep the traditional publishing industry alive?

I don't think that the takeaway from the whole Shy Girl thing is that AI writing is inherently evil and that we need to ban them. I think it's a challenge to human writers: if you want to beat the machines, you just have to write better than they do.