What will creative writers do once AI slop stops being slop?

AI will fake the human touch so well that humans may no longer be needed to provide it.

For a long time, arguments about AI and writing have missed the point. They usually get stuck on bad examples: clumsy AI text, bland summaries, the endless stream of obvious ‘AI slop’ flooding social media. From there, people jump to comforting conclusions: AI lacks originality, AI lacks a human touch, AI can’t really write. That line of thinking feels safe, but it’s probably temporary.

A more useful way to think about writing is to split it into two intertwined processes. First, there’s the generation of ideas: arguments, plot lines, characters, internal coherence, thematic direction. Second, there’s the act of putting those ideas into words: choosing phrasing, rhythm, tone, style, and structure. Being good at that second part is what people usually mean when they talk about craft or being a ‘wordsmith’.

Right now, AI already dominates the second process. Non-native speakers see this clearly. Many people brainstorm roughly, then ask an AI to turn those thoughts into clear, fluent English. The result often sounds confident, natural, and professional. The same workflow works just as well for native speakers. Give the AI a clear brief, a style guide, or a sample of your own writing, and it can produce text that sounds uncannily like you, or like an attractive hybrid style that never existed before.

Once you accept that, the next step is uncomfortable but logical. The first process is also becoming automatable. Not fully, perhaps, but enough to matter. AI can already act as a thought partner: spotting clichés, proposing plot twists, stress-testing arguments, flagging inconsistencies, suggesting alternatives. You can externalise the whole thinking process into structured notes, then hand it off to another model to write it out. At that point, writing becomes something like 70 per cent machine, 30 per cent human.

Push this forward twenty years and the implications get sharper. Imagine AI systems that can generate genuinely original plots, characters, and ideas, while cross-checking against the entirety of human literature to avoid repetition. Imagine they can invent new styles on the fly, not by mimicking Borges or Ishiguro, but by synthesising patterns no single human ever wrote. At that stage, writing is no longer scarce. High-quality stories and poems become cheap, fast, and everywhere.

Don Quixote read too much chivalry slop. Source: Wikimedia Commons (Universidad de Sevilla).

This is where the usual defence of writers starts to collapse. People often retreat to the idea of ‘the human touch’, as if emotion or depth only counts when it comes from a biological brain. But readers don’t experience the author’s neurons; they experience the text. If an AI-generated piece moves you, challenges you, or feels intimate, then the human touch has already been simulated well enough to function. The origin stops mattering.

The painting analogy helps clarify what’s coming next. People sometimes argue that painting survived photography because of the physical artefact: the texture of oil on canvas, the exquisite wooden frame, the small imperfections, etc. But now imagine AI-powered robots that can physically paint original oil paintings, perfectly. Not copies, but genuinely new works, executed with human-level technique. If anyone can order a Mona-Lisa-quality painting for their living room, the ‘physicality’ argument collapses. What exactly does the human painter offer at that point, beyond a promise that a human hand held the brush and did the thinking? There will certainly be a market for ‘human-certified paintings’ for sure, but it will probably be even more niche than the current one. When even the material object can be generated at scale and at perfection, craftsmanship loses its economic edge.

Creative writing may be heading down the same path. AI will write too well, too cheaply and too often. In that world, creative writing won’t disappear as a human activity, but as a profession, it might potentially shrink to the point of irrelevance.