Sam Kriss on AI's weird writing style... in December 2025

This article is very much of its moment.... I expect AI's writing will evolve and fracture... but it's a fascinating story about communicating.

"Before too long, essentially all writing might be A.I. writing. ... If we’re going to turn over essentially all communication to the Omniwriter, it matters what kind of a writer it is. Strangely, A.I. doesn’t seem to know...."

"In fact, A.I.s end up collapsing into drivel quite a lot. They somehow manage to be both predictable and nonsensical at the same time. To be fair to the machines, they have a serious disability: They can’t ever actually experience the world. This puts a lot of the best writing techniques out of reach. Early in “To the Lighthouse,” Virginia Woolf describes one of her characters looking out over the coast of a Scottish island: “The great plateful of blue water was before her.” I love this image. A.I. could never have written it. No A.I. has ever stood over a huge windswept view all laid out for its pleasure, or sat down hungrily to a great heap of food. They will never be able to understand the small, strange way in which these two experiences are the same. Everything they know about the world comes to them through statistical correlations within large quantities of words."