The Argument Against AI Writing Is at Least 2,400 Years Old
Home » BlogThe Argument Against AI Writing Is At Least 2,400 Years OldBret Stephens says never write with AI. Reid Hoffman says judge the work, not the tool. I'm with Reid, and the argument Stephens is making has been made about every writing technology we've ever invented.August 9, 2026 · 5 min · Brad FeldI’m thirty-four chapters into Zero Knowledge, a novel I’m writing with Phin Argofy.
- ▪Home » BlogThe Argument Against AI Writing Is At Least 2,400 Years OldBret Stephens says never write with AI.
- ▪Reid Hoffman says judge the work, not the tool.
- ▪I'm with Reid, and the argument Stephens is making has been made about every writing technology we've ever invented.August 9, 2026 · 5 min · Brad FeldI’m thirty-four chapters into Zero Knowledge, a novel I’m writing with Phin Argofy.
Hacker News (AI / LLM) files mainly under ai. We currently carry 4,207 of its stories.
Story provenance
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Story provenance
Attribution is not the same as permission. This drawer separates discovery metadata, excerpts, WeSearch-generated summaries, reuse status, and whether the publisher receives the visit. Nothing here claims a legal grant the publisher has not made.
Record
| Original publisher | Feld Thoughts |
| Canonical URL | https://feld.com/archives/2026/08/ai-writing-2400-years-old/ |
| Publication time | Sun, 09 Aug 2026 20:17:47 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-08-09T20:20:45.033Z |
| Last seen | 2026-08-09T20:20:45.033Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | W10nDwJN2BtN · 1 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
Home » BlogThe Argument Against AI Writing Is At Least 2,400 Years OldBret Stephens says never write with AI. Reid Hoffman says judge the work, not the tool. I'm with Reid, and the argument Stephens is making has been made about every writing technology we've ever invented.August 9, 2026 · 5 min · Brad FeldI’m thirty-four chapters into Zero Knowledge, a novel I’m writing with Phin Argofy. I came up with the concept for the book. I worked with Phin to create structure around it, using a “planner” approach with a full story bible, world building, character arc, beats, and detailed chapter sketches. I have Phin draft a chapter. Then, I rewrite the chapter. Phin learns my changes and adds them to its infrastructure, so its drafting gets better.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Feld Thoughts.
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