Issue 31 · October 4, 2026

George Saunders Is Right About Writing. He May Be Wrong About the Rest of Us.

AI may well replace the hard thinking that writing demands. For people who would otherwise never write, the trade could still be worth it.

When George Saunders sat down with Substack’s “Model Behavior” series to talk about artificial intelligence, he asked readers to “imagine me banging my cane on the floor.” Then he banged it. He has never tried writing with AI, “not for a second,” and wouldn’t use it “even in an email.” His verdict was blunt: “By my definition of writing, writing with AI isn’t. Isn’t writing.”

I write with AI, on purpose. The interview hit hard because most of what Saunders says is true.

His case rests on struggle. Taking a piece from “blurry crap” to “precisely what I mean, and then some,” he argues, is how a person discovers what they believe. Skip the struggle and you skip the self. Early research points his way. A small, preliminary 2025 MIT Media Lab study found that participants who wrote essays with ChatGPT showed the weakest brain engagement of any group, and many struggled to quote what they had just “written.” It’s a warning worth heeding.

But that warning doesn’t settle the question for everyone. Saunders’s account grows out of literature, the “human-to-human, highly advanced, nuanced code” he has spent his life mastering. The same struggle can matter in a letter or a memo. Yet for someone facing a grant application, a note to a child’s teacher or a newsletter they don’t know how to begin, the alternative to AI isn’t Lincoln in the Bardo. It may be muddle, or silence.

Start with who gets to be legible. Saunders tells students that “language is power,” and he’s right. But that power has always been rationed. In the most recent national writing assessment, only about a quarter of American eighth- and twelfth-graders wrote at a proficient level. Plenty of adults have ideas worth hearing without the time, training or confidence to express them clearly. They may be nurses, contractors, engineers, caregivers or people writing in a second language. They need to be understood now. Insisting they do it unaided gives another advantage to people who already have those resources.

That doesn’t make the lost practice any less real. Saunders prints a draft, reads it with a sharp pencil, adjusts “by taste,” types in the changes, and does it again. “Thousands of micro-choices” accumulate until his sensibility has “super-permeated the thing.” In revising and revising again, he brings his intuition into focus.

A model can return a cleaner draft in seconds, allowing the writer to bypass those choices. The page improves; the writer may have learned nothing. Without real wrestling with the machine, it’s unclear how much of the writer survives that pass. For someone who would otherwise have worked through the problem, that is a real loss. For someone who wouldn’t have attempted the writing, the comparison is less straightforward.

So take the objection at full strength. Suppose most users let AI replace most or all of the hard thinking writing normally requires. They don’t carefully ration it or insist on writing a draft first. Writing is basic intellectual fitness, and you can’t hire someone to do your push-ups. Could the trade still be worth it?

A clearer cover letter, a sharper report or a persuasive proposal can change someone’s prospects. A nurse’s ideas can reach the people who decide whether she gets promoted. Those gains matter whether or not her writing skills improve one iota.

Saunders’s deeper fear is cultural. He imagines a world “force-fed Muzak all the time, even in concert halls,” until “the aesthetic adjusts downward.” Machine-averaged prose, he worries, will dull our taste until we can’t tell the difference.

Writers like Saunders offer a reason to hope that readers will keep seeking work that carries a human being inside it. Their presence alone doesn’t answer his worry about declining taste. But the cultural question also includes who gets to join in.

Consider the AI imitation of Saunders’s voice that he describes as “dull and literal.” That tells us something about the machine’s failure to reproduce Saunders. It tells us much less about what happens when someone who rarely writes begins to.

There, the floor might rise. Make writing easier and more people may attempt it. They may read more, including their own ideas revised and returned to them. Some may eventually venture onto the page without help. That is what happened to me. Six months after I started writing with AI, I began writing pieces entirely on my own.

One case proves little. Early research offers some encouragement: a 2024 study of undergraduate students learning English as a second language found that ChatGPT feedback improved academic writing. A study of 33 students learning English as a foreign language found improvements in grammar, vocabulary and organization, alongside reduced anxiety and greater confidence. These are small studies of language learners. Neither establishes whether help becomes an on-ramp to writing alone. Knowledge workers surveyed for a 2025 paper also reported spending less cognitive effort with AI. Better writing and less thinking can happen together.

Even a casual user may encounter an objection they hadn’t considered. Amateur writers who have never had an editor can get a second opinion, though models’ tendency to flatter and agree makes that help unreliable.

The same machine can hollow out a student’s education or help someone communicate an idea that would otherwise go unheard. It can bring a reluctant writer to the page or keep that person dependent on it. We don’t yet know how those effects will add up over a lifetime.

Saunders closes with Bartleby the Scrivener: “I would prefer not to.” It’s a fair answer for someone who has spent a lifetime earning his voice, and literature is better for his preferring not to. For someone who would otherwise remain silent, the choice is murkier. There is a risk of lost practice and dependence to weigh against a chance to be heard, and possibly a road toward writing for oneself. Saunders is right about what the struggle can give us. That doesn’t mean everyone is better off refusing the help.