A Doomed Writer in the Age of AI
August 17, 2026

Finished the current edit of my novel manuscript and finally have
time once again to write other things. Though how long writing by
humans will continue to happen, and/or continue to be valued, is 
an open question.

There's already evidence that AI is slowly killing the how-to
genre[1] and while I don't think it will kill fiction any time soon, 
AI summaries, along with things such as TikTok, YouTube shorts, and
other bite-sized videos, seem to be reducing the ability of the
average human to engage with anything that takes more than a few
minutes to complete.[2]

If this is true, then the novel could be a doomed genre, and the
short story of less than 500-1000 words not far
behind. In fact, the genre of microfiction spans all the way down to 
six-word stories. (Though to be honest, six words is more of a creative 
writing exercise than anything else). Many works in the microfiction 
realm come in 500 words or less--which is roughly the 
length of a single page. And reading one page is the amount of time that 
people seem to be willing sit still and concentrate on one thing these days. 
Anything longer or more complex to read may be an endangered species.

So when it comes to length, I'm endangering myself by writing 
regular short stories of a few thousand words, let alone expanding 
my writing to writing a include a novel or two here and there.

To make matters worse, I don't use AI at all--in life or in writing.
I'll admit that I did once take an hour or so to use Google's Gemini/
Nano Banana to play with turning photos of myself and my wife into
different types of art--Durer prints, art nouveau, an interesting
cubist portrait. But that's been the sum total of my AI use so far.
I even skip over the helpful AI summaries at the top of my Google
search results. (Which, by the way, seem to be killing the very sources
of information they use to produce their results.[3])

Perhaps not using AI is cutting my own throat in the age of quick-and-easy
(but sometimes incorrect) answers, but for me, it's a matter of
principle. I believe AI is unsustainable as a business model and
has too many flaws (some now reveling themselves) to ever live
up to the promise of its promoters. So I do much of my research
--and all of my writing--the old-fashioned way.

And last of all, I have, for years now, had a love for em-dashes.
They're incredibly useful to set apart parenthetical information,
gathering together and summing up points made in a long sentence,
or even just for emphasis. However, they also seem to be one of
AI's most often used punctuation marks. So I've been writing like
AI long before AI existed. No doubt, future scholars will 
nevertheless assume I used AI to write much of my work--that is,
if they don't accuse me of either plagarizing myself or writing
so well that I could not have done it on my own.[4]


[1] https://tim.blog/2026/06/12/has-ai-already-killed-nonfiction/
[2] https://dl.acm.org/doi/fullHtml/10.1145/3613905.3651018
[3] https://thewalrus.ca/google-search-is-dying/
[4] https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/crelev8gw5xo


(c) 2026 Andrew Gudgel
contact [at] andrewgudgel [dot] com