Sportswriting legend Red Smith once said that writing a column is easy: “All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.” In 2026, though, no blood is required. All you do is sit down at a laptop and have Claude or ChatGPT write the story for you.
That seems to be the takeaway from a cluster of reports from the journalistic front of late. Last month, my colleague Maxwell Zeff wrote about writers who unapologetically generate at least some of their prose via unbylined AI collaborators. The star of his piece was Alex Heath, a tech reporter who said he routinely has AI write drafts based on his notes, interview transcripts, and emails. That same week, The Wall Street Journal profiled Fortune reporter Nick Lichtenberg, who explained to the paper that he leans heavily on AI to churn out his work. He has written 600 stories since July; on one day this past February, he had seven bylines.
Ever since reading these reports—thankfully produced by the human hand—I have been having trouble sleeping. Until recently, the consensus had been that using large language models to actually create commercial prose was verboten. Many publications, including WIRED, have firm guidelines against AI-generated text. We don’t use it for editing, either, which is a less alarming, though still troublesome practice of several others cited in Zeff’s column. The book publishing world, trying to protect itself from an avalanche of self-published slop, is still policing its catalog; Hachette Book Group recently retracted a novel that had apparently relied too much on the output of an LLM. But as the models turn out prose that is becoming increasingly harder to distinguish from human outputs, the convenience and cost savings of using AI for the difficult job of writing are threatening to seep into the mainstream. The walls are starting to crumble.
As one might expect, a lot of people were unhappy to read about this development, particularly those like me whose keyboards are dripping with blood. But the subjects of the stories aren’t backing down. It’s as if they feel the future is on their side. When I contacted Heath—whose work I respect—he confirmed that he had gotten pushback but shrugged it off. “I see AI as a tool,” he says. “I don’t see it as replacing anything— the only thing that’s replaced is drudgery that I didn’t want to do anyway.”
Of course, the hard work of writing is, for people like me, a critical aspect of the whole effort, bringing one’s self to the task of communicating effectively and clearly. Heath thinks that he does connect with readers through his writing—he says that he has trained his AI to sound like him, and his Substack includes personally written tidbits about what he’s up to. On the other hand, he tells me that since he talked to Zeff, he has almost “one-shotted” a couple of his columns. “When I say one-shot, I mean I almost didn’t need to do anything,” he says. But Heath disputes the idea that letting AI write prose for him means that he’s bypassed the thinking process that many believe can only happen though actual writing. “I’m just getting rid of that very messy, painful, zero-to-one blank page,” he says.
The Fortune writer who was the subject of the Journal article also has suffered repercussions, not just from the public but also his friends and colleagues. “I’m feeling a strain in close and personal relationships,” Lichtenberg admitted in an interview with the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism. In an email, Fortune’s editor in chief, Alyson Shontell, tried to steer me away from the idea that AI was taking over the jobs of reporters under her watch. “Importantly, [Lichtenberg] is not using it as a writing replacement,” she wrote. “His stories are ai assisted versus ai written. Still lots of ambitious reporting and analysis and reworking he is doing that’s highly original.”
