A new tension is shaping how writers think about style. As large language models become more common, some authors, editors and marketers are trying to make their work feel less machine-like by leaning harder into the features that show a human made it.
The shift is not a single manifesto or a formal movement. It is a set of practical choices: fewer predictable structures, more personal detail, less polished uniformity and, in some cases, even deliberate mistakes.
Writers Are Reworking Their Style Around AI
Laura Brooke Robson began writing Love Is an Algorithm last year, a novel about the cofounder of an AI dating app and a musician navigating life in the age of large language models. While working on it, she became more conscious of avoiding the surface habits she associates with AI prose.
Robson says she began avoiding “wishy-washy metaphors” and took “a more winding path to avoid an em dash or a tripartite list.” Her goal was not simply to reject AI. It was to make the writing feel more visibly authored.
That impulse has changed how she writes. “I find myself writing less mechanically,” she says. She also describes an urge “to make little mistakes, like winks to the reader,” including invented phrases or unexpected punctuation.
Robson sees a broader literary consequence. “I think AI could absolutely trigger a literary counterculture,” she says. In her view, literary fiction may move further toward “the weird, the esoteric,” while personalization shapes commercial fiction.
The New Tells Of Human Writing
The anti-AI writing style described by writers in the source often forms by rejecting what many now read as AI signals. Those signals include lists of three, passive voice, “not x but y”, and em dashes.
But the deeper point is not punctuation alone. The emerging preference is for prose that carries the trace of a person: specific first-person memory, unusual comparisons, visible effort and a voice that does not sound interchangeable.
That creates a strange reversal. For years, many writers were trained to remove irregularities, smooth out oddness and make copy cleaner. Now, some of those same marks of polish can read as suspicious when they resemble generic AI output.
- First-person experience can signal proximity to the subject.
- Eccentric phrasing can make a sentence feel less automated.
- Rough edges can suggest that a human made choices rather than accepted defaults.
- Unexpected punctuation can interrupt the smoothness associated with AI prose.
Editors Are Changing What They Ask For
The pressure is not limited to novelists. Across magazines and digital publications, editors are also adjusting how they guide writers.
Richard Fisher, an honorary professor at University College London and editor at online culture magazine Aeon, says AI has led him to encourage writers “to be more human” and more conversational. He argues that editors should not remove every rough edge, because AI cannot produce prose as “spiky or idiosyncratic” as human writers.
At Pitchfork, Mano Sundaresan became head of editorial content in July 2024. Coming from a blogging background, he encouraged writers “towards their own voice,” a direction he says may, in hindsight, have been connected to the broader AI turn.
Pitchfork editors later sent writers a memo saying no AI may be used when filing review copy and encouraging first-person perspectives. The point is not only to prevent AI use. It is also to protect a style of criticism rooted in human taste and lived response.
AI has also affected pitching. Philip Picardi, editor-in-chief of Playboy, opened the magazine’s inbox to pitches in May and received around 1,000 submissions. After experimenting with Claude, he says he believed the majority had been generated with AI.
Picardi says that experience made “first-person human experience” important to Playboy. He has since encouraged more formally adventurous writing, pointing to figures “like Foucault, or, you know, bell hooks,” and saying the magazine wants writing AI cannot replicate.
Accusations Have Raised The Stakes
The publishing world has also seen anxiety around claims of AI use. In March, Hachette pulled Mia Ballard’s horror novel Shy Girl after online speculation that its writer had heavily used AI, a claim she rejected.
Ballard says she has new writing forthcoming and has changed her approach. “Having my writing feel more real and authentic is my number one priority,” she says. She also says she is editing her own writing because she claims an editor she hired ran the book through AI software.
Another case involved Steven Rosenbaum’s book The Future of Truth, described as an examination of “how AI transforms reality.” It was alleged to contain multiple fabricated quotations generated by AI, which Rosenbaum later admitted was true.
For writers watching these controversies, style is no longer only an aesthetic concern. It can affect trust. A sentence that feels too generic may invite suspicion, even when the work is human.
Deliberate Imperfection Becomes A Signal
Some responses to AI prose are openly comic. Clickhole writer Jessye McGarry wrote an article titled “5 Reasons to Love Summer (NO AI)”, filled with typos and repeated claims of human authorship. One line included the misspelling “beaitiful sunshine!”
McGarry says the spelling mistake was “a funny, exaggerated choice.” She also says it required extra effort because she had to undo autocorrect.
The same logic has moved into business writing and LinkedIn. Ray Slater Berry, founder of marketing agency dslx, says he pushes for first-person content because he wants to see the “blood, sweat, and tears” behind it. He says the agency will “always be writing in the first-person from hereon out.”
In April, venture builder Ben Horwitz created Sinceerly, which he calls the “anti-Grammarly.” The app deliberately leaves typos in emails and signs messages off with “sent from my iPhone.”
Horwitz says that when he A/B-tested standard emails against Sinceerly-generated ones sent to Fortune 500 CEOs, the only emails opened were the ones with lowercase, misspelled subject lines. His conclusion is that people now want “something different and for a lack of uniformity.”
John Warner, a veteran writing teacher, published More Than Words: How to Think About Writing in the Age of AI Last April. He argued that AI could renew the value of good writing, including style and process. Warner says he had spent years trying to move students away from the five-paragraph essay and what he calls “pseudo-academic BS,” the kind of writing he says ChatGPT now produces.
The result is a paradox. AI has made many writers more anxious about style, but that anxiety may also push them toward sharper, more distinctive work. If AI prose sounds smooth, broad and interchangeable, the counter-move is to write with more evidence of a person behind the page.