AI Writing Has Entered Its Post-Shame Era

Subscribe here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube AI-infused writing is suddenly everywhere: not just in automated email responses or meeting summaries, but in books and even the pages of mainstream newspapers.

When an editor at The Wall Street Journal recently defended an op-ed that was 100 percent written by AI, it felt like a possible turning point, at which people are no longer apologizing.

So is AI-assisted writing in its post-shame era? What does that mean for the way we process, communicate, and think? Host Charlie Warzel talks to the journalists Elizabeth Spiers and Teddy Brown about being a writer when the robots are coming for you, and how technology does not have to be inevitable.

The following is a transcript of the episode: Elizabeth Spiers: I just worry that AI is making everybody dumber.

I think when you outsource the fundamental cognitive arsenal that you’re using to actually construct a good argument or to make a piece of art, what happens to us as a society if everybody’s outsourcing that to AI models? Teddy Brown: When I worked in tech, I was writing 3,000-page papers about really dense B2B-enterprise marketing strategies, or whatever.

Yeah, exactly.

And I would get to the end, and it would go onto the website: I have no idea what I wrote about.

I could not tell you one thing about that, because it was just all flowing through Claude.

Charlie Warzel: I’m Charlie Warzel, and this is Galaxy Brain , a show where today we’re gonna talk about artificial intelligence and the thing that I do for a living, which is writing.

We’re almost four years into the ChatGPT era, and AI writing is everywhere.

It’s flooded the internet.

We’ve got SEO spam, slop—all that synthetic pablum that’s just immediately recognizable.

A Pew Research analysis from July estimated that “signs of AI authorship can be found in over one-third of web pages published after ChatGPT was released.” One-third of web pages.

It’s come for schools; it’s come for universities, which have been struggling for years to get students to write papers without chatbot assistance.