Writing and Anthropomorphization of the Machine
Erase the Em Dash. Modify your sentence structure. Do not write like that. It’s AI. There is fear in every writer’s keyboard. Writers are now contorting themselves to sound less like machines, that ironically enough, were trained on human writing. Artificial Intelligence (AI) is the current repository for some our best human writings. It will Em Dash with the best of them. Grammar? It will best most of you.
Professional writers are responding to AI as if it another human that they are in competition with (Varanasi et al., 2025). There is a deep-seeded fear of being replaced by the machine. Never before have humans created a tool, that we can have what we perceive as intelligent conversations with. This tool, not only generates creatively, analyzes, but engages in “context-sensitive conversations” (Varanasi et al., 2025). When faced with this, the creative does, what most people have done throughout history, faced with what they perceive as their imminent demise would do, they are afraid, and they rebel. (Varanasi et al., 2025)
With a writer’s identity tied to their prose there has been a scramble to distance one’s self from the machine. In academia, there is anathema to writing produced by AI. You can be blackballed, expelled, and disgraced for the accusation of AI usage.
Is this knee-jerk reaction similar to Thamus? (Postman, 1992) Is this new technology actually a new intelligence we now have to contend with that will erase us and our creativity? If we look to the past, it would suggest that we cannot guess at how much this new technology is going to disrupt our future. Neil Postman would contend we are no longer in the same world we once existed in. We are now existing in the age of Artificial Intelligence. The world is brand new. We have entered into a new era.
Adopters, Resistors, Pragmatists
In a fascinating paper–Writing Symbiosis: Mapping Human Creative Agency in the AI Era Vivian Doshi and Mengyuan Li (2026) collected over 50,000 written documents of various types. The years spanned from 2021-2024. They analyzed the papers. Their findings determined that there are three distinct groups of people when it comes to AI use and writing. The adopters. People who show evidence of the syntactic homogenization that is characteristic of AI usage and text. The resistors. Those that showed no variation in their writing style/syntax structure. Lastly, the pragmatists. Those that maintained their writing style and voice but engaged with AI.
This coincides with a similar study which looked at Creative writing professionals and their interaction/use of AI had developed. They also mapped how writers were adapting or resisting the new technology. In AI Rivalry as a Craft: How Resisting and Embracing Genrative AI are Reshaping the writing Profession by Varanasi, Wiesenfeil & Nov (2025) it looked more closely at the lived experiences of the writers and opposed to their writing. It closely followed the pattern of the Adopters, Resistors, and Pragmatists (Doshi & Li, 2026). Writers either tried to distance themselves from AI, creating a persona that differentiated themselves from AI. In a sense, developed a writerly “couture.” While others used AI as a tool. It helped them attain a difficult “voice” or style that may lay out of their particular talent. Adopters of AI were perceived by some as having a time advantage but lacking creative variety and depth. But the “couture” writer was at a disadvantage due to the time it took to write, so they often sacrificed quality to keep up with the AI competitor. This homogenization is a common identifier of AI writing.
AI writing style
Syntax is the arrangement of words and phrases in a sentence. Every language has it’s very own syntax. Humans are foulable. We change. We like to break things up, vary, take our time, spin out of control, and possibly turn on our heels walking out the door slamming it on the way out. But AI. It is not that way. It is consistent. It is grammatically correct. It is efficient and tends to average “18.4 word per sentence and 1.53 clauses” (Tojiboyeva, 2025). It has been found that AI systems seem to favor clarity and syntactic predictability. Which is what lends its beige and homogenized flavor to its fairly recognizable writing style. Humans use variation to express various emotion, meaning, and ideas.
To give an example the last paragraph was run through Perplexity with the prompt: Rewrite this for an academic paper. Here is the response:
Syntax refers to the arrangement of words and phrases within sentences. Although every language has its own syntactic conventions, human writers use syntax flexibly and often depart from predictable patterns to convey emotion, emphasis, complexity, and individual voice. Human language may include abrupt fragments, extended sentences, shifts in rhythm, or unconventional structures that reflect changing thoughts and emotional states.
In contrast, AI-generated writing tends to be more consistent, grammatically conventional, and efficient. Tojiboyeva (2025) reported that AI-generated text averages approximately 18.4 words per sentence and 1.53 clauses per sentence. This pattern suggests that AI systems often favor clarity, balance, and syntactic predictability. While these qualities can improve readability, they may also contribute to a comparatively uniform or recognizable writing style. Human writers, by contrast, employ syntactic variation to communicate nuanced meanings, evoke emotion, establish tone, and develop an individual stylistic voice.
The writer’s voice is gone. The message is clear. Academically, it may pass as a more professional paper. But what has it lost in nuance? If humans took the gift of Theuth (Postman, 1992) and learned to express their spirit, their minds wandering via words on the pages, can you blame them for crying into the night as they feel their art being ripped from them? Much in the same way the weavers smashed the machines that were to replace them (Varanasi et al., 2025). One person described being forced to use AI as demeaning. They would use their own writing just to keep their own spirit alive (Varanasi et al., 2025).
When a writer is told they “Sound like they have used AI” it can be one of the most devastating, or shameful things of their career. There is distinct evidence that AI has affected linguistic complexity (Doshi & Li, 2026). To an artisan who has spent years crafting a style and voice linguistic complexity is their craft. Not only that, this uniformity threatens to exacerbate linguistic diversity erosion and cultural marginalization (Doshi & Li, 2026). When the written word begins to all look the same. Flow the same way. Have the same cadence. It will lack the twists and turns of the human mind and heart.
Tools and the Future
The writing implement did not kill the story. The printing press did not kill the writing implement. History has shaped the printing press, but the idea has not died. Language has continued to shift and change during this evolution as well. While our conversations may hang on similar subjects the words we use today are vastly different than Shakespeare’s time. Humans are tool using creatures. The advent of artificial intelligence does not change our nature.
There is a push pull with adoption and resistance. They are not mutually exclusive. They can coexist (Varanasi et al., 2025). Thamus and Theuth are both correct, new technologies are both a blessing and a downfall, and at the same time a person should make all efforts to avoid that trap that is the conceit of wisdom (Postman, 1992). Believing that there is the all or nothing paradigm with AI to a person’s detriment. It will keep them trapped. It will be necessary for all writers to be able to dip their toes into the digital stream that is the digital world we exist in. It is also necessary for them to pick up their pencils to scribble notes in margins.
People still think AI will become sentient. Some believe it is. One can wonder if our grandchildren will consider that Blade-runner was prophetic. When will there be a line to cross from anthropomorphizing our creations to granting them rights. There will be many stories told about it between now and then.
Writing will endure the era of AI. It will not look the same as it once did. It may develop cottage industry, or morph into a couture status. More writing will be produced by machines. Machines will learn to sound more human like. It is possible most people will no longer be able to differentiate between human and machine at some point. It however will not erase the poet in the corner with ink-stained fingers, after all words like violence break the silence… (Depeche Mode).
References
Depeche mode – enjoy the Silence Lyrics | Genius Lyrics. (n.d.).
https://genius.com/Depeche-mode-enjoy-the-silence-lyrics
Doshi, V., & Li, M. (2026). Writing in Symbiosis: Mapping Human Creative Agency in the AI
Era (arXiv:2512.13697). arXiv. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2512.13697
Muñoz-Ortiz, A., Gómez-Rodríguez, C., & Vilares, D. (2024). Contrasting Linguistic Patterns
in Human and LLM-Generated News Text. Artificial Intelligence Review, 57(10), 265.
https://doi.org/10.1007/s10462-024-10903-2
Postman, N. (1992). Technopoloy: The surrender of culture to technology. Knopf.
Tojiboyeva, M. (2025). SYNTACTIC COMPLEXITY IN AI-GENERATED AND HUMAN-
WRITTEN ENGLISH TEXTS: A COMPARATIVE STUDY.
https://doi.org/10.5281/ZENODO.17519947
Varanasi, R. A., Wiesenfeld, B. M., & Nov, O. (2025). AI Rivalry as a Craft: How Resisting
and Embracing Generative AI Are Reshaping the Writing Profession. Proceedings of
the 2025 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 1–19.
