The Rise of Anti-AI Writing: A Literary Counter-Culture

Last year, novelist Laura Brooke Robson began writing Love Is an Algorithm, taking extra care to avoid sounding like AI. She wrote sentences she doubts she would have attempted before LLMs, avoiding “wishy-washy metaphors” and taking “a more winding path” to avoid AI-like structures. Robson says her writing has fundamentally changed for the better, becoming a deliberate inverse of AI’s lack of style. “I find myself writing less mechanically,” she says. “I have this urge to make little mistakes, like winks to the reader, to show there’s a human behind the words.” Robson is part of a larger cohort practicing an anti-AI writing style. Across journalism, criticism, and creative writing, writers are converging on choices that resist AI-generated prose. The style takes shape through negation of AI tells (lists of three, passive voice, em dashes) and prizes idiosyncrasy, using first-person anecdotes and eccentric similes. “I think AI could trigger a literary counterculture,” says Robson. “Literary fiction will shift further toward the weird, the esoteric, while personalization takes hold of commercial fiction.” In publishing, allegations of AI use have troubled authors. Hachette pulled Mia Ballard’s horror novel Shy Girl after speculation she used AI, a claim she rejected. Ballard now prioritizes making her writing feel “real and authentic.” Steven Rosenbaum admitted using AI-generated quotations in his book The Future of Truth. Ellena Savage, an Australian novelist, says AI has “stolen” syntactical conventions she once valued, missing the “rule of three” and em dashes. Across magazines, this counterstyle is reshaping in-house style. Richard Fisher, editor at Aeon, encourages writers to “be more human” and conversational. Mano Sundaresan, at Pitchfork, promotes first-person voices and banned AI use in reviews. Philip Picardi, editor-in-chief of Playboy, seeks formally adventurous writing after detecting AI-generated pitches. Jessye McGarry’s Clickhole article “5 Reasons to Love Summer (NO AI)” intentionally included typos to prove humanity. On LinkedIn, instructive posts on avoiding AI-like writing are common. Ray Slater Berry’s marketing agency now writes in first-person, holding monthly meetings to update their anti-AI style document. Ben Horwitz’s app Sinceerly deliberately leaves typos, finding success with “imperfect” emails. John Warner argues in More Than Words that AI might reinstate the value of good writing. While AI could eventually mimic this counterstyle, the current trend might improve writing quality, especially for lesser-known authors. “Whatever cosmetic counterstyle is created, AI could mimic,” says McGarry. “The only true counterstyle is good writing.”