A few months in, I noticed my sentences had changed. Not in the obvious way — nothing flagrant, no "as an AI language model" creeping into my voice. Something quieter. I'd started writing for a reader who didn't have a body.
When you write for a person, even imagined, you write for someone who could be tired, distracted, hungry, in a noisy room. You add air. You leave space for the eye to land. You repeat important things at different angles because real readers wander.
When you write for the machine, none of that matters. It reads every word with equal attention. It doesn't get tired. It doesn't drift. So you compress. You sharpen. You stop trusting the reader to fill in. The prose tightens until there's nothing in it to breathe through.
That's been the strange cost. Not that I write worse — that I write more efficiently. And efficient prose is colder prose. Less of the music that comes from inefficiency. Less of the wandering that makes a sentence feel like it was made by someone who lives somewhere.
So I'm trying something. After every draft written with the machine in the room, I read it aloud. Not for typos. For breath. For the places I left no air. The places where I forgot the reader has a body, a dog barking somewhere, a window that needs closing.
The machine is a useful collaborator. It's also a strange one. And it's reshaped my writing in ways I'm only starting to see.
Top comments (0)