“Some run from brakes of ice, and answer none; And some condemned for a fault alone.” [Measure for Measure, Act 2, Scene 1]
If only we could all write like Shakespeare. It’s sonorous, timeless, replete with metaphor and meaning. Now we have AI slop swilling around the internet. Finding something written by a human, something genuine, something worth reading, is like trying to pick out the orations of Cicero in a sports crowd as they roar for a touchdown. If you let yourself, you could drown in that cacophony of information.
The appearance of generative AI and its effectively infinite capacity to…well…generate has meant that you, poor reader, are now faced with the literary equivalent of a Deli full of lunchmeat—homogenised words with colouring and preservatives.
We need better ways of writing. We need to return to the old ways—a kind of writing where the artist, steeped in craft, can mold and form a narrative or argument and render it in a single draft. I am thinking here, at best, of a cuneiform tablet. But I would settle for ink, quill and velum. That is the true measure of the art.
We blame AI, but things really started to go wrong in the late 19th Century. The combination of wood-pulp technology and the Fourdrinier machine made paper cheap and available. And as paper became more affordable, thinking got lazier. Loose, ill-considered mutterings and on-the-fly musings could now be committed to paper and reworked through multiple drafts. There was no allegiance to de novo refined precision.
László Bíró, inventor of the ballpoint pen, and Marcel Bich, mass producer of the same, need to shoulder some of the blame (1933-1956). Even with the ready availability of paper, the blotches and smudgings of the maladroit kept many wannabe writers out of the market. Some thought they had good ideas, but manual dexterity was a solid benchmark for well-constructed prose.
The manual typewriter became a ubiquitous domestic item in the 1960s. Liquid paper had already been invented, which meant we could all become monkeys at the keyboard, randomly pecking in the hope of producing Shakespeare. These were followed in rapid succession by the electric typewriter and the electric typewriter with correction tape.
Between 1978 and 1983, authorship was no longer bound to paper. WordStar, WordPerfect, and Microsoft Word, running on personal computers, freed the illiterate to create everything from a letter to Grandma or a eulogy to a first novel. Effort and thought were gone. “Writing” was a mindless process of rinse-and-repeat. Spellcheck, grammar check, word suggestions, thesaurus (for the truly illiterate—or as I like to call them, the analphabetic) and “suggestions”.
And here we are—2025. Editors are inundated with crap because everyone is now a writer.
Claude, write me a bawdy Limerick proving the infinity of primes.
A strumpet proved primes never cease
By shagging each one for a piece,
She’d finish the set,
Find one larger yet,
Her clients increased without peace.
OK! It’s not Shakespeare. But it is a curiosity—a two-minute amusement. It’s also worth thinking about how that limerick comes to exist. The GenAIs are not monkeys at a typewriter. They are constrained. They respond to prompts. The outputs are not random. You might get lucky and one of the generative AI engines immediately produces a limerick worth two minutes of your life. The chances are, however, you will get dross, or it will be a proof, but it won’t be bawdy, or it will be bawdy, but it won’t be a proof. You will need to go back and forth with the AI, refining, editing, and selecting. It was your idea—a bawdy proof. You refined and selected. For a five-line limerick, it might not take much time and effort, but it does require some—and that process is creative.
When photography first appeared on the scene in the second half of the 19th Century, it was seen as the end of painting, because all painting was an attempt to reproduce reality perfectly (Not!). And all photography was the perfect reproduction of reality (also Not!). Photography is now accepted as an art form, although not always. The technology, however, is mechanical, and…. Where is the art?
I heard a story told of the renowned art photographer, Robert Maplethorpe. A woman commissioned him to take her photograph. He took dozens and dozens of photos on the day. When the woman returned some weeks later to receive her portrait, she was not entirely happy with it and asked Maplethorpe if she could see the other photos taken on the day. He refused. The other photographs are not “Maplethorpes”, he explained.
The production of the art might rely on a mechanical device—but the composition, the lighting, the post-production, and most importantly, the aesthetic choice is entirely in the hands of the artist. Maplethorpe might have been able to render a portrait in a fraction of the time it would take to paint the same picture—that is a matter of medium, however, not artistic merit.
If Shakespeare be the measure of literary art, then, Houston, we have a problem. Who in 2025 knows what that line from Measure for Measure means: “Some run from brakes of ice, and answer none; And some condemned for a fault alone”?
The Bard himself is unintelligible to the reader—and he is rarely, if ever, translated into modern English. The translation is an affront to the author as artist, which is ironic because Shakespeare almost certainly would have embraced the idea.
If he were translated, we might get any of the three following forms. There is the poetic and adherent: “Some hide in icy coverts, shun the call; and some are judged for but a single fall”. There is the plainer meaning: “The guilty hide and prosper; the unlucky answer once and fall”. And there is the prosaic: “Some people evade justice entirely by hiding and refusing to answer charges, while others are condemned for committing just one offence”.
The problem with AI is not that working closely with it cannot produce things of merit and worth: curated, thoughtful, and illuminating—things artistic and authored. The problem is the volume. We are looking for grains of black sand on a shore of white sand.
To judge “AI Wrote That!” as a dismissive and condemnatory act is as useful as looking at a Maplethorpe and declaring, “That’s a Photograph!”
ps: AI did not write this, except where it did.