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Will AI Rob Young Writers
of Their Role Models? |
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The technology might be unstoppable, but so is
the need to express ourselves through writing |
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By GREG BEAUBIEN Jan. 26, 2026 |
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WHEN PEOPLE SAY they use artificial intelligence in their writing, my eyes ache from rolling. Perhaps today’s AI “writers” are relieved that forgery is now considered efficient. “ChatGPT writes all my first drafts now,” they sniff. “And then I just add my touch to it.”
An innocent child needs to burst into the room, throw his arms up and shout: “But the robot wrote it!”
The nonsensical notion that someone can call a text their “writing” when a machine has assembled it out of bits and pieces of other people’s real writing seems to have been instantly and uncritically accepted by many people, including some whose livelihoods depend wholly or in part on stringing words together and then presenting a bill for that service.
Watching this bandwagon’s wheels strain under the weight of all those jumping aboard it recalls a similar phenomenon we witnessed in 2020, as millions of Americans fell into line with the woke agenda and cheered—often with the help of commercially available yard signs—for their own destruction. Now, observing widespread acquiescence to the “AI does all my writing” absurdity makes me feel like one of the last humans walking among the pod people in the Invasion of the Body Snatchers movies.
Those who confidently assert that chatbots conceive their content ideas or write their “first drafts” for them tend to repeat variations of the same resigned statements—as if the looming end of the ancient human urge to write is preordained and we all must accept it: “Well, you can’t fight AI,” they’ll say. “It’s here to stay. It’s just another innovation, like the internet or social media.”
While bragging about the time they save by having ChatGPT do their writing for them, these AI enthusiasts, especially those whose work involves writing, stand smiling with arms open to welcome the demise of their own careers.
Writing is a form of human expression, like playing the violin. But as more people think it’s no big deal to have AI write for them, those same people probably won’t mind—and might even think it’s cool—if what they read has also been barfed up by a machine.
Poor-quality books spit out by AI, including novels, are flooding Amazon.com, sluicing sales away from genuine books, the Authors Guild reports. A recent study by AI-heavy marketing firm Graphite found that more than half of online content is now AI-generated. The research notes that this robot writing is mostly news updates, how-to guides, lifestyle posts, reviews and product-explainers—not counterfeit forms of creative writing like fiction, poetry or feature stories. And these AI-generated articles don’t always appear on Google or ChatGPT, the Graphite study says.
But as the researchers note with an executioner’s indifference, having a large-language model generate texts “is a cost-effective alternative to spending hundreds of dollars for humans to write content.” Imagine, those greedy freelance writers, expecting hundreds of dollars for their work.
Some studies even claim that AI writing is better than human writing. According to research at MIT, people perceive product advertisements generated or augmented by AI to be higher in quality than advertisements produced by humans. A study by Originality AI, a company that sells AI-detection tools, claims that “Despite confidence in their own ability, humans tend to struggle to spot AI-generated content.”
Is it just a matter of time before the pretense of authenticity is dropped, and all new “writing” will be assumed to have been generated by machines? |
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Meanwhile, people who still appreciate quality literature and journalism, including those who write for a living, might feel as if they’re standing alone on a tiny island whose shores are shrinking, as the mainland recedes in the distance. In their isolation and diminishing numbers, these lonely castaways understand something that fewer and fewer Americans seem to grasp these days: Whether we’re writers ourselves or just enjoy reading, we read great work not only to be informed, entertained or moved—although those are important reasons—but because we admire the writers. We look up to them. We appreciate their talent and skill. They are our role models.
Young people, including young writers, need role models they can admire, which is something that AI cannot provide. A 2014 study by Ines Schindler, a researcher at Free University Berlin, linked admiration to greater levels of personal growth. In a 2013 study, Schindler found admiration “is elicited by outstanding role models who represent specific ideals or values [and] can encourage people who aspire to grow by showing that it is possible to actualize ideals.” Another study, from German researchers in 2006, found that “admiring is one of the most important means for the development and growth of a human’s personality.”
Worrying that the end of human writing will mean that young people with the talent to write won’t have role models might sound like saying that a consequence of nuclear war would be that people couldn’t order Chinese takeout anymore. But like many parents, in my case as the father of a young lady who will graduate from college this spring, I care about the future of her generation.
When I was a young feature writer in the 1990s, my role models were older newspaper reporters, magazine writers and authors. I looked up to Mike Royko, the great Chicago Tribune columnist whose daily entry on page three lampooned city politics and the malapropisms of Mayor Richard J. Daley. I read the paper’s international correspondents and respected their bravery and skill.
Picking up Esquire, GQ, or Vanity Fair in the ’90s, you might have encountered novelist Jim Harrison writing about food, his fellow novelist Philip Caputo covering Robert Redford and fly fishing, Walter Kirn wondering whether “The Zonked Out Nerds of Silicon Valley” will save America, Peter Bart on “How to Get Ahead in Hollywood,” or Gerri Hershey on male victims of political correctness in the workplace. Without knowing any of these writers personally at the time, my striving peers and I saw them as role models for their work and their successful careers.
Caputo, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author of nineteen books, including A Rumor of War (1977) and Wandering Souls: And Other Stories (2026), told me that when he was a young reporter at the Chicago Tribune in the early 1970s, he looked up to his bosses, Bill Jones and George Bliss, both Pulitzer-winning investigative reporters. “George Bliss was older, in his late 50s or early 60s, a kind of father figure,” Caputo recalled. “When George was a cub reporter in the 1930s, he witnessed the arrest and shooting of John Dillinger in front of the Biograph movie theater.”
Chicago Tribune reporter Bill Jones, on the other hand, “was in my generation, an ex-Marine like me, and an absolutely brilliant journalist, with the capacity for controlled outrage that is the mark of a top-notch investigative reporter,” Caputo said.
There was a time, now fading in the AI era, when we admired journalists and authors for their talent, wit, insight and inimitable voices, their ability to tell stories that reveal truths about life and the world, tales that stir our imaginations and touch our souls. |
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When I was starting out I also looked up to authors who had either died decades earlier, like Ernest Hemingway, or were in their 80s, like Paul Bowles. In 1997 I even traveled to Tangier, Morocco, to sit at Bowles’s bedside and talk to him about his work.
Sure, it could reasonably be argued that a young man wanting to emulate figures like Hemingway and Bowles, that romanticizing their international lifestyles as much as admiring their work, was naïve and foolish. It certainly wasn’t practical. But the different stages of our lives all serve important purposes for us. When you’re young, ambitious and eager to make your mark, having role models in your field is a kind of unilateral mentorship that propels you forward and helps shape the adult that you eventually become. The person you want to be. The writer you hope to be.
When she was a freshman studying writing and publishing at Pace University’s Dyson College of Arts and Sciences in New York in 2020, Nicolina Barone published a volume of her poetry called Serendipity. In 2022 and 2023, she won fiction-writing awards at the school and a scholarship for a novel she was writing, before she graduated in 2024.
The young writer told me via email that she has “countless role models,” but in particular she cited romance author Emily Henry, whom Barone said “has created a type of romance novel that is deep and raw. As an aspiring author who has always known love would play a big part in my stories, it feels like authors like Emily are paving the way for young female writers who deserve literary recognition despite the genre they choose to write in.”
Asked about artificial intelligence and its effect on literature and writers’ role models, Barone said “unfortunately, people will use AI in different types of writing.” But “Stories come from a human’s heart and mind, from lived experience [and] asking questions about the human condition, about our lives. Although I am sure if you ask AI to write you something it could, it would never feel the same way for readers; it would lack a human heart and soul.”
Barone said “Fiction is for empathy, creativity, and understanding, and that’s something AI will never be able to compete with. If young writers start to find role models in authors or writers who use AI, it may be that writing isn’t what they truly want—maybe it’s fame, or respect, or success. But if you are a writer, and nothing else speaks to you or feels the way you do when you write, not one part of you would want to give that process up to a robot.”
Young writers have always faced an uphill battle, but their struggle will only intensify as artificial intelligence threatens to turn writing into the editorial equivalent of cheap knock-off goods. If AI replaces human expression, and young people born with the talent to write lose their role models and their opportunity to do the work they were born to do, the cost won’t fall just on them, but on all of mankind. We will have lost something vital.
Part of the reason we love young people is that we see ourselves in them, even as they look up to us. We’re aware of the continuum they represent and we want the best for them. But in the AI era, will young writers even find it worth the trouble to use the talent that God has given them, or will machines squander God’s gifts?
Let’s hope people will still want to read real writing. No matter what happens with AI, writers need to keep writing, so the next generation will, too.
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Greg Beaubien’s feature stories have appeared in the Chicago Tribune, the Los Angeles Times, and Travel + Leisure. His first novel was the acclaimed psychological thriller Shadows the Sizes of Cities (2014). His next novel, the crime drama THE DEVIL IS WAITING, will be published in June 2026 by Moresby Press. |
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BOOKS CULTURE BEAT
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Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises a gossipy roman à clef as Everybody Behaves Badly |
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