Late-Period Periodicals

The magazine and newspaper industry was chomped to pieces by the internet and chewed up in the great financial crisis. The survivors of the larger culling have learned to live in the new environment for now. But how much longer?

Recently, I have noticed the proliferation of clearly AI-authored text appearing under human-authored bylines. People who don’t use tools like Claude and ChatGPT have trouble recognizing it. But there’s a certain empty rhetorical snappiness to the prose that LLM-powered AI agents like Claude and ChatGPT generate. “One works by X, the other by Y,” or “The sequence matters because,” or “That point is load-bearing.” Or “I have to be straight with you.”

It will be formally perfect and shined up but substantively thin, and far too pleased with itself. I think the proliferation of this work — which isn’t always just copied and pasted but is now overly influencing writers who lack a strong authorial voice — is an environmental poison in the ecosystem of intellectual publications.

First, obviously, it introduces a kind of fraudulence to the enterprise. More seriously, it steals the crucial impression that real minds are confronting one other. Instead of a prize fight between contenders with real stakes and a real purse, we have a simulated boxing video game.

The printed word is a culture. While each magazine and publication has its own reasons for existing and those should be enough, they are more likely to thrive in a cultural environment where other strong magazines — including intellectual competitors — are healthy as well.

Human ghostwriters were not as much a threat as AI represents. Yes, the AI, like a human ghostwriter, is trying to reproduce in clean professional prose the thoughts you seeded into it. But a human ghostwriter will bring a human touch. A good ghostwriter makes himself like the author. An AI ghostwriter makes the man more like a machine. In the past week I’ve had the experience of reading two essays, one written in response to the other, that had the same telltale signs of AI authorship. While reading the second, I could not suppress the impression that I was wasting my time watching software simulate an intellectual exchange rather than two people having one. So I stopped reading.

Writers really can, by using this shortcut, burn up the last bit of trust between the few remaining readers and the few remaining publications that serve them. If readers come to think they can just get the same output from a $20 subscription to Anthropic’s chatbot, they will leave periodicals behind forever.