The Same Paints Everywhere
What the complaints about AI prose are actually about.
A version of the complaint that keeps surfacing in conversations about contemporary writing goes something like this. The em-dashes. The not-A-but-B construction. The rhythmic attrition of certain sentence structures. I can feel the machine in the prose.
The complaint is real, and the patterns the careful reader is identifying are really there. But I am not sure the complaint is about AI.
When you slow it down, the complaint is rarely this specific essay was AI-touched. It is closer to I keep seeing the same paints everywhere. The em-dashes are not disliked because they were produced by a model. They are disliked because they show up in newsletters, blog posts, substack essays, and somewhere on the third newsletter of the day the careful reader notices the cadence is the same cadence and the structure is the same structure and the whole cultural commons of English prose has started to taste of one ingredient.
The objection is to the monoculture.
This is a much older problem than the current one, and naming it correctly matters. Anyone who lived through the era of stock-photography corporate websites knows the shape of it. The complaint then was never these images were taken by cameras. The complaint was that the same images were everywhere. Adobe Stock did not solve the problem by improving the cameras; if anything, it made the problem worse, because once an enormous library of competent images was cheaply available, the same library was being mined by everyone, and the convergence accelerated.
This is the pattern. A new tool makes mass production of a previously skilled output much easier. Practitioners flock to the tool because deadlines are deadlines. The tool has a basin of attraction — defaults, presets, sequences it reaches for first — and most practitioners do not have the time or inclination to fight the basin. The output converges. Readers and viewers, encountering the converged output, register the convergence as flatness, sameness, machine-feeling. They reach for the explanation closest to hand, which is usually the tool itself. But the tool being a vector converges to the disease.
What is happening now is the same pattern, with a particularly powerful tool. Frontier language models have an enormous latent space of plausible prose, but they have preferred basins — constructions they reach for first, cadences they default to, rhetorical structures they recombine more readily than others. Used passively, they pull prose toward those basins. A thousand writers, all using the same models, all accepting the models’ defaults, will converge on a common surface. The em-dashes and the not-A-but-B are visible signs of that convergence. They are what the careful reader has learned to look for, because looking for them is easier than naming the thing underneath, which is that all the prose suddenly seems to be coming from the same place.
The thing the careful reader is actually defending, beneath the complaint, is expressivity at the lexical level. The audible idiolect (aka. unique fingerprint). The writer whose prose is recognizably theirs — whose sentences could not have been written by anyone else, who has built up over years a private grammar of preferences and refusals that constitutes their voice. The gallery containing many painters, each with their own palette, rather than one collective palette diluted across many canvases. This is a real thing to want. It is has been worth defending in every previous monoculture cycle.
In the previous essay I touched on the other side of this question and I do not want to leave it hanging. I suggested then that some audiences can receive a piece of writing past its surface fingerprints, all the way through to the idea underneath. Specifically, I suggested that AI itself, and some neurodivergent readers — readers whose attention is structured differently than the median, who track idea and structure more strongly than surface cadence — can be that audience. It is true at the level of any single essay. Not every reader needs the surface to be distinctive in order to receive what the writing is doing. The idea-traveling reader is a real audience, and the writing made for that audience is real writing, and the surface convergence does not destroy it. I relate to this audience as it does not bother me. It may have to do with cognitive tolerances to being exposed to repeated nested algorithmic structures visually or in other renditions without getting disoriented or nauseated.
But the careful reader I described above is a different kind of reader, with different equipment and different needs, and their loss is real even when the idea-traveling reader is unaffected. A field that produces only surface-converged prose still delivers its ideas to the readers who can hear past the surface; it just stops rewarding the reader who has spent decades training their ear. The diversity-of-paints concern is a concern about that population of readers — not a claim that all reception depends on surface distinctiveness, but a recognition that surface distinctiveness is what a particular kind of attentive reading is built to detect. Those readers lose something when the prose flattens, regardless of whether other readers notice the flattening at all.
A healthy field probably has to serve both. The work that travels on idea alone can travel; the work that rewards careful surface attention can also exist; the readers who occupy either or both of those positions deserve to find writing made for them. The convergence is what makes the second kind of work scarcer, and the careful reader is right to grieve its scarcity. It is the accurate emotional registration of an aggregate effect that the tools are amplifying.
What it requires, in any era, is the same thing it has always required: individual practitioners exercising taste hard enough to resist the basin their tools are pulling them toward. Stock photography did not destroy photography; photographers who cared about their own eye continued to make distinctive images, and the larger field has, in the decades since, recovered most of its variety. The same will be true here. The monoculture is real and the convergence is real and the careful reader’s recoil is honest. The answer is to use them with enough taste to refuse their defaults — at the lexical level, where the convergence is most visible and where the careful reader’s training is concentrated.
I am not one of the readers who feels this exhaustion. The patterns that fatigue them do not fatigue me — my own attention is structured differently, and the prose around me does not dull in my hearing the way it dulls in theirs. But the perception and convergence is real. The careful reader who has spent decades training their ear has not been wrong. They are seeing the same paints, everywhere.
That diversity is worth defending regardless of whether the convergence fatigues them personally. The careful reader’s grief is the field’s early-warning system. It is the part of the field that notices first, and the part most worth listening to when it speaks.