I really enjoyed the article “Why Does AI Write… Like That?” even before I realized it was written by Sam Kriss, whose Numb at the Lodge newsletter has sent me some of my favorite uneasy, experimental essays of the Substack era.
I write fiction (for fun, for myself, for you), and I also spend a lot of time writing a particular kind of expository text in my professional life (for money). I am writing much of the day, most days. Over the years, in my professional writing, I have become my own kind of large language model. My brain contains vast reservoirs of the things I have written before, and when I approach a new project I know that there are certain structures I will turn to again and again. I am writing in the codified voice of an institution, not as myself.
With fiction, however, what draws me as a reader and a writer is distinctive voice. I love reading works in translation partially for this reason, because of what the act of translation does to language. As a writer, I often start with a more straightforward draft, and then try to figure out where I can push things off-kilter, whether through language, dialogue, or perspective. The study Unnatural Voices by Brian Richardson is a great introduction to different techniques in making narrative voice weird.
But even outside of more experimental fiction, what makes stories memorable is often a strong voice. Let’s look at one of the all-time greats, Shirley Jackson, and the opening to We Have Always Lived in The Castle.
My name is Mary Katherine Blackwood. I am eighteen years old, and I live with my sister Constance. I have often thought that with any luck at all I could have been born a werewolf, because the two middle fingers on both my hands are the same length, but I have had to be content with what I had. I dislike washing myself, and dogs, and noise. I like my sister Constance, and Richard Plantagenet, and Amanita phalloides, the death-cup mushroom. Everyone else in my family is dead.
In classic Jackson fashion, there is a lot going on in this opening. While the prose is clear and straightforward, it’s immediately apparent that our narrator, Merricat Blackwood, is neither of those things. She jumps without transition from subject to subject, transmitting a list of facts with very particular asides (but I have had to be content with what I had), and ends with the surprising punch of “Everyone else in my family is dead.” If she is talking to us, the readers, she does not care about our comfort or understanding. This opening is our introduction to Merricat, and sets up in miniature everything we eventually learn about her over the course of the novel.
Unlike fictional AI, the current iterations of large language models don’t have particularly interesting voices. Their writing lacks a sense of surprise, of turn or sting. They move repeatedly to the same structures and rhythms, even when their metaphors collapse into incoherence. The result is prose not so much invisible as forgettable, a kind of emphatic corporate speech that slides away from the mind as soon as it is read. It all sounds the same.
I have a short, horror-ish story I’m shopping around right now that’s about this kind of algorithmic sameification. My story is about doubling, but also about machine-assisted refinement towards a single amalgamation. I have tried to make the narration as alien and off-putting as I possibly can.
Additional Reading
If you’re looking for fresh narrative voices beyond the algorithm, may I recommend seeking out small press publications? You can start with LitHub’s 100 Notable Small Press Books of 2025.
Leave a comment