Why I went back to writing sentences without AI

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Isn’t this supposed to be peak AI? A runaway era of technological madness that will fling our species into the bog like an Iron Age human sacrifice, or leave us in a soma-like haze of piña coladas and pottery-based self-actualisation?

Don’t ask me. I don’t know.

I can easily imagine us drifting into an endless Jolly Holiday, like Mary and Bert stepping into one of those chalk drawings. I can also see AI drone swarms finishing off the last of us in a sodden patch of she-oaks down by the river. I’ll stick with Mary Poppins. She reminds me of my English grandmother in Cape Town, who loved Julie Andrews.

I’d like to think an AI would struggle to write the sentences above. I’d be wrong, of course. Today’s models would keep those metaphors in sharper order. But they wouldn’t have chosen them, because they never watched Mary Poppins beside my Nana. Nor would they have reason to reach for a bog body or a she-oak. These ideas come from a life all my own: from twenty slightly battered watts of fleshy biological power, all firing synapses and simple sugars.

Pangram, an AI detection tool, shamed me into going back to writing sentences without AI collaboration (even if I use it constantly for research and editing). This essay was supposed to be about why AI won’t produce a dominant winner the way search did, because value depends on grid connections and power, and those can’t be copied. But here we are, with something different, because I started with a blank page and a blinking cursor.

Writing is difficult for all of us. I was blessed with journalists for parents, yet I grapple with the ache of being unable to say something true because the words aren’t there. AI offers only the mirage of a solution. When the sentences won’t come, it’s because I haven’t spent time doing the thinking. Sometimes, I’ll read an old article I wrote in conjunction with AI, or worse, wholly outsourced to it, and I’m ashamed. That writing is hard is the whole point.

There’s something depressing about our slow dwindling in the art of words. A study published in 2024 found that 58 percent of English majors at two Kansas universities could not make head or tail of the opening of Bleak House. The most delicious evisceration of wordslop comes from Sam Kriss, in his essay “If you let AI do your writing, I will come to your house and kill you”. Kriss and I, and probably you too, don’t want to receive unsolicited LinkedIn newsletters which start with sentences like: “Here’s the thing: the real value lies not in the technology itself, but in how we choose to use it.”

I’m amazed by how many high-end consultants and executives heave this guff into the ether without even an attempt to hide AI’s tells. I’ve heaved some of it myself. If your prose lights up like bodily fluid under blue light, I won’t make the second paragraph. Do you realise that trading on the beige predictability of a chatbot makes you less impressive than if you sent nothing at all? Dr Seuss, rest his soul, would have had something like this to say:

You can think a thought fat, you can think a thought thin
you can think one so twisty it ties up to your chin
But the Snerg in the suit at the Slop-o-Mat-Nine
never thought, never thunked, never thinked a whole line.
He just clinked on a button and out the words poured,
all so crispy and creamy that the readers were bored.
“Here’s the thing!” howled the Snerg, and he sent it to all.
But the thing wasn’t his. It was no thing at all.

I had breakfast in Sydney last week with my friend Waleed Aly. We were talking about his new Quarterly Essay, Time of Monsters, on whether the long march of liberalism has finally stalled. The essay, he said, was one of the hardest things he’d written. I’m seventy pages in and enjoying it so much. One reason is that he never uses AI. Not for anything. He sits down and his mind ranges free, from Ibn Khaldun to Andrew Hastie and back again.

If it was hard for Waleed, it’s allowed to be hard for me. I’ll stick with Mary Poppins and my twenty battered watts. The sentences come slower and messier, but they’re mine.

About the Author

Luke Heilbuth is CEO of sustainability strategy consultancy BWD Strategic, and a former Australian diplomat.

On Substack, Luke writes about the systems we’re breaking and the blindness that lets us — from climate and geopolitics to AI and the future of work. Read & Subscribe on Substack here.