30 Mar 2026

There’s No App for That

by Maria Bustillos

I have a lot of trouble talking about genAI “writing” with people who are in favor of it because it is super embarrassing to me, and pitiful, that anyone would confuse slop with the real thing.

When I say “the real thing,” though, I don’t mean whether or not you can ID genAI writing in a newspaper quiz. I mean that real people with histories, memories, ideas, stories, etc. to share are interesting, and machines don’t have those things and are not interesting. So that genAI “art,” just to begin with, has already whiffed on the original point of, and reason for, making writing, or art, or music. Then, when writers or artists reject the premise that genAI produces anything like what they would consider to be writing or art, they inevitably find themselves rejecting a person—as if saying no, you can’t sit with us—and that’s a horrible feeling.

This is going on all the time now. “Who’s a Better Writer: A.I. or Humans?” asked a would-be provocative headline in the New York Times a couple of weeks ago. The other day I read a listserv post in which this guy announced that readers should care only that a piece of writing moves or engages them, regardless of whether a real person wrote it or not, and he advanced this view in tones suggesting that it would be elitist to get all het up about that.

AI-powered “storytelling” applications are proliferating like freaking kudzu.