If AI Wrote Everything From Today On… What Would Happen?
Half of the new articles already are.
My Medium friends can read this over on Medium.
Every text you read from today on was written by AI. A human picked the topic and the angle. The machine wrote the words. Nothing else changed.
What would be different?
I keep circling this one because it is barely hypothetical. Graphite ran 43,000 English articles from CommonCrawl through a detector and found that AI-generated articles passed human-written ones in November 2024. Since then it has been roughly fifty-fifty.
So half the experiment is already running. Let's finish the other half in our heads.
The floor comes up
First effect, almost all texts would be clean. No typos, no paragraph that goes nowhere, no wall of text without a break in it. The structure would be well… structured.
That might matter a lot for the person who has a great idea and no idea how to write it down. A mechanic who knows exactly why your car does that thing, an accountant who understands one specific rule better than anyone, a nurse with twenty years of night shifts. They all get to write it all down with ease.
The edges go first
Shumailov and colleagues published a paper in Nature in 2024 on what happens when models train on their own output. Their term for it is model collapse, and the mechanism is that the tails of the original content distribution disappear. The middle, sort of typical survives. The odd stuff does not.
That is a finding about training data, not about prose. But the shape is the same when every text comes out of the same handful of AI models.
The average goes up. The range goes down.
You might not notice it in any single article. But you would notice it after a month of reading. Everything competent, nothing strange. No writer who is "unconventional" in an interesting way. No sentence that only one person on earth would have built like that.
New information
This is probably the most interesting thought here.
A text is a pipe, kind of. Something goes in at one end that one person knew, and it comes out the other end where other people can use it. That is the idea, right? The prose is the pipe.
If every text is written by the same few models, the models are not adding anything new. Are they? They are recombining what is already in there. The only new material entering the system comes from the prompt.
Which means it comes from a human.
Then the writing is not the work anymore. Having something to say is the job.
And that is a much harder job than writing, some would argue. Because ideas are the currency. You cannot batch those easily. You can ask AI for ideas, but you'll get the same pool as everyone else.
So creating a real idea pool requires having done something, gone somewhere, gotten something wrong and noticed. I already ran into a small version of this when voice-to-text changed how I write. The typing got faster. The thinking did not.
Reading changes too
We talk about this as a writing problem… which it certainly is. But it is a reading problem just as much.
If I knew everything was machine-written, I would stop asking whether a piece is "well" written. That question would be dead after all. Everything is grammatically and structurally well written. AI can do that pretty well. But is it "good"?
I would start asking whether anyone actually had the experience.
Names, prices, dates, places, a photo out of a window, a number someone had to measure. Proof. The value moves from the sentence to whatever the sentence can be checked against.
The machines are already doing this, in a way. Graphite looked at 31,493 keywords in October 2025 and found that 86% of articles ranking in Google Search are written by humans. For articles cited by ChatGPT and Perplexity it was 82%.
Half of everything published is AI, and the systems built on AI still mostly point at people.
Substack started scanning last week. Readers can now run a Pangram check on any post and see an estimate of how much was written by hand, and writers can add a "How I make this" statement instead. Medium has had a rule since May 2024 that fully AI-written stories do not go behind the paywall.
Both platforms are betting that readers want to know.
I don't need to know. Also, detection tools are easily fooled, or entirely incorrect in the first place. But in the end, does it matter? If the story is a good read, it's a good read… no matter who wrote it.
What I would lose
I spent ten years as a computational linguist before I did this, and I have been blogging since 2007. So I trained machines and wrote myself.
The pieces of mine that people write back about are almost never the really polished ones. They are more often the ones where I was wrong or incomplete in my thinking, or where I admitted something a bit embarrassing, or where the sentence came out broken because I am not an English native speaker.
An AI writing in my voice does not get those, usually. It gets the rhythm and the tics and the short paragraphs. It can mimic those. It cannot deliver it like I can or you can, because it did not have the afternoon that caused it.
To be fair
I do use AI to work, daily. Mainly for the automation of the boring tasks around writing and my job. But also increasingly for research, drafting, and correcting.
Writing was never sacred in that sense. We accepted spellcheckers for a long time, editors, ghostwriters who put a CEO's name on someone else's sentences, writing tools that correct and "improve".
There is a real case that a text is a delivery mechanism and I am romanticizing the packaging because I happen to like it. But people with something to say and no writing skill have been locked out of publishing for a long time. A machine that helps with that is worth some collapsed variance.
The Bottom Line
The thought experiment does not end where we might have expected. I thought I would land on "the writing gets worse." It does not necessarily, depending on how we measure that. What is now called "AI slop" because of some overused expressions or signs, was totally normal a few years ago. Nobody would have noticed.
Now we do.
If AI Wrote Everything From Today On, the writing would get more competent each day… but also maybe less interesting.
Right now, the ability to write a clean paragraph is still worth something. In an AI-only world it is worth nothing, because everyone has it.
What is left is what you put into the prompt. Which is just what you have seen, done, screwed up, and paid attention to.
So the question is not whether AI can write like you, but rather what would you have to say?
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