Setting Up Shop Next to the Uncanny Valley

Who decides to start writing in 2026?

“I now feel awful for anyone who wants to tell a story post-2026. You will forever be doubted. If you love an em dash the way I do, or you like flowy run-on sentences like I do, if you grew up reading Proust to let the words flow over you in all their glory, if you memorized sonnets so the iambic pentameter would soak into your bones, you’re gonna sound like a fucking bot.”

That excerpt is from Hugh Howely, the author of Wool, 1 in a post he titled “ End of an Era ”. And his broader point is that writing used to be hard and with now it’s easy with generative AI… except you’ll sound like a bot.

And for whatever reason the distinction between what’s real and not real is very important to humans. We can appreciate facsimile and verisimilitude, but only up to a point. The Uncanny Valley is a great example of this: the more human a thing seems the more affinity we have for it, until we decide that it’s not actually human enough and we are repulsed by it.

My version of the Uncanny Valley chart. They brought in zombies, not me.

And Generative AI is pushing us into the writing equivalent of the Uncanny Valley.

Before 2022 and the “ChatGPT moment” an article or essay was a reflection of how a person thought and felt about a topic. Generating that material involved hours of researching, writing, and editing. The result was an author’s thinking encapsulated as words on a page.

Now we’ve got a little magic box that generates clear writing with a simple… Read more ↗