More Typos, Fewer Em Dashes: Writers Are Creating an Anti-AI ‘Literary Counterculture’
“I have this urge to make little mistakes, like winks to the reader, to show that there’s a human behind the words. What if I did something unexpected with my punctuation?”Robson is part of a larger cohort of writers who are practicing what could be called an anti-AI writing style. But it also prizes idiosyncrasy as its overriding principle, tapping into specific first-person anecdotes and eccentric similes that demonstrate the necessary drudgery of writing.“I think AI could absolutely trigger a literary counterculture,” says Robson.
- ▪“I have this urge to make little mistakes, like winks to the reader, to show that there’s a human behind the words.
- ▪What if I did something unexpected with my punctuation?”Robson is part of a larger cohort of writers who are practicing what could be called an anti-AI writing style.
- ▪But it also prizes idiosyncrasy as its overriding principle, tapping into specific first-person anecdotes and eccentric similes that demonstrate the necessary drudgery of writing.“I think AI could absolutely trigger a literary countercultur
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| Publication time | Wed, 29 Jul 2026 10:30:00 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-07-29T10:41:12.160Z |
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Emma MaddenCultureJul 29, 2026 6:30 AMMore Typos, Fewer Em Dashes: Writers Are Creating an Anti-AI ‘Literary Counterculture’Novelists, journalists, and power LinkedIn posters are embracing first-person narratives and idiosyncrasies to avoid being mistaken for chatbots.Photo-Illustration: WIRED Staff; Getty ImagesCommentLoaderSave StorySave this storyCommentLoaderSave StorySave this storyLast year, when the novelist Laura Brooke Robson began writing Love Is an Algorithm—a love story between the cofounder of an AI dating app and a musician trying to survive in the age of large language models—she took extra care not to sound like AI herself.She wrote sentences she doubts she would have attempted before the advent of LLMs, avoiding what she calls “wishy-washy metaphors,” and took “a more…
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