Is AI creating your writing from now on?

Do you use AI in your creative writing? Do you think AI will replace your writing?

34THPARALLEL MAGAZINE, 16 OCTOBER 2025

Artificial intelligence (AI) is taking over the world.

The measurable, quantifiable, and provable benefits of AI as against the hyperbole and promise, according to Cole Stryker and Ivan Belcic, of IBM, a computer company, includes improving business performance, weather forecasts and disaster prediction, software development, chip technology, and research in drugs and nuclear fusion.

So how is AI taking on your creative writing?

Will Brewbaker, a Duke University professor of creative writing, says, “AI poses a real threat to our creative faculties. When we offload the generation of ideas, images, and language to a large language model (LLM), we are, to quote Duke professor Thoman Pfau, ‘actively ceding agency’ to a machine and thus depriving ourselves of the inherent goods that come from exercising our own creativity.”

Brewbaker goes on to say in a Duke news article by Daniella Freedman, digital media intern, “Maybe I’m naive, but I think that many (even most) real writers, whether ‘professional’, students, or otherwise, simply aren’t tempted by AI. They recognize that the value it provides is fundamentally different than the value they can get from reading, say, the poems of Elizabeth Bishop or the novels of James Joyce. If AI provides value to the human as consumer, then poetry provides value to the human as human.”

First-year English student at Duke, Emerson Eickholt says, “I believe AI could be used honorably to generate ideas or help with the editing process. AI should be used to polish already-created work. There are aspects of the art of writing that people are superior in, and there are aspects of writing in which AI has the leg up. AI becomes helpful when people learn not to use it.”

How does AI affect your writing, if at all?

“The most valuable thing to me in terms of my mental health is to read a poem or see a painting or listen to music which speaks to me, which breaks me open for a moment, and where I feel an experience honestly and delicately portrayed,” says Charlie Kaufman, the screenwriter behind Being John Malkovich and the Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, in The Guardian newspaper.

“I have a responsibility, as I see it, not to put garbage in the world. I’m not going to do that.

“If you start trying to figure out what it is that people want, you are doing what AI does.

“AI can never create anything artistically. It doesn’t have the experience of being alive. It doesn’t know loss and joy and love and what it feels like to face mortality.”