The real value of writing Vs AI slop

Good writing cannot be reduced to grammar, style or vocabulary. The craft lies elsewhere. It begins with noticing what others dismiss. It begins by asking questions and noticing patterns others don’t see

MUMBAI: An analysis by Pangram Labs of more than one million social media posts found that about one of four long form posts on social media are AI generated. And nearly 2/3rd of it appear on LinkedIn. Allow that to settle in—a platform built to showcase professional expertise has become one of the internet’s largest publishers of machine-generated writing. The patterns of what people write about are now impossible to miss as well.

· Every setback is now a lesson in resilience.

· Every promotion is accompanied by a ritual expression of humility.

· Every leadership anecdote ends with an inspirational takeaway.

The prose is polished. The grammar impeccable. The structure familiar.

Read 10 such posts you begin to get the drift of who’s written what. The detail differs. The thought is pretty much the same.

Now, the easiest thing to do is blame AI for the explosion in writing. But that would be lazy. Mediocre writing always existed. Companies produced forgettable press releases. Consultants generated jargon-dense reports. Search-engine optimisation (SEO) gave rise to millions of articles written to satisfy algorithms. Fact is, AI did not create commodity writing. It simply made such writing astonishingly cheap to produce.

So, the question is not whether AI can write. It can. The more useful question is whether producing sentences is what writing was ever about. Writers have long known that the first draft is rarely the destination. It is the beginning of an inquiry. An argument that seemed watertight may collapse under evidence. A stray observation changes the direction of the piece. By the time the final sentence is written, the writer has often arrived at a conclusion that was invisible when the first sentence was typed. Writing, in other words, is one of the ways thought is produced.

That is why good writing cannot be reduced to grammar, style or vocabulary. The craft lies elsewhere. It begins with noticing what others dismiss. It begins by asking questions and noticing patterns others don’t see.

When this hypothesis was tested with entrepreneur and technology investor Sanjay Anandaram, he answered it without referring to writing at all. Anandaram spoke instead about originality. Could a machine, trained on everything humanity knew until 1905, have independently arrived at Einstein’s theory of relativity? Could it have conceived Darwin’s theory of evolution? Could it have imagined Jamini Roy’s visual language before Roy painted it or Georges Seurat’s pointillism before Seurat transformed European art? These questions cannot be answered conclusively. But they illuminate an important distinction. There is a profound difference between mastering an existing body of knowledge and originating a new way of seeing it.

Anandaram then took the argument a step further. Human intelligence, he suggested, is inseparable from human experience. It does not merely process information; it interprets it. It recognises grief in a pause, confidence in a glance, discomfort in a silence that lingers a second too long. It understands that the same sentence can mean entirely different things depending on who says it, where it is spoken and what history surrounds it. Facts, in isolation, rarely tell a complete story. Meaning emerges only when those facts are placed within a human, social and cultural context.

That, ultimately, is what writers do. They are not in the business of manufacturing sentences. They are in the business of making sense of the world. Two reporters can attend the same press conference, hear the same speech, interview the same people and return with entirely different stories. The difference is seldom vocabulary. It lies in what each reporter noticed, what each chose to ignore and the frame through which each interpreted the facts. Writing begins long before the first sentence. It begins with the act of seeing.

This, Handa and Anandaram agree is where the scarcity lies—to recognise weak signals before they become trends. To ask questions that are not yet obvious. To connect ideas that appear unrelated. These are not linguistic skills. They are acts of judgment.

This is why a writer who competes with AI on fluency has already chosen the wrong battlefield. Machines are already better at that. They may eventually produce beautiful ones. This is why, perhaps, AI has done writers an unexpected favour. They will learn to see better.

EOM