Born to Write. Do I Bad Write Now?

The writer’s dilemma in the age of AI.

The em dash is a problem. I’ve always used them. I moved on from semi-colons years ago. Em dashes looked better to me. They created space on the page. They’re exciting, modern—not quite a semi-colon, and not formal either.

Full colons are an issue too. I’ve used them in headlines forever. There’s a power to them, an h1 punch, an economy too. Headlines writers dole out words like misers as the church bucket passes—begrudgingly. Five words is okay, three better, but the colon allows the room to flex. Can I get away with six? Seven?

Born To Write: Now What?

Let’s go to the AI.

Here are some headline suggestions that play with tone, style, and structure to match your introspective, slightly ironic, and writerly piece:

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🔥 Clickbait-Style (but writer-smart):

1. I Was Born to Write—Now AI Writes Better?

2. The Writer’s Crisis: Born to Write, Do I Bad Write Now?

3. My Em Dash Addiction and Other Writer Problems in the Age of AI

4. Help! AI Doesn’t Care About My Beautiful Colons

5. Born to Write: But Am I Now Just a Prompt Generator?

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🧠 Literary-Ironic:

1. Born to Write, Reduced to Prompt

2. The Writer’s Dilemma: In Praise of the Em Dash, in Spite of the Algorithm

3. I Write Therefore I Am (Until ChatGPT Writes It Better)

4. Colons, Em Dashes, and the Slow Death of Original Thought

5. Born to Write: But Who Reads Us Now?

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✍️ Stylized and Punchy:

1. The Em Dash Wars: A Writer’s Identity Crisis

2. Writing in the Shadow of the Machine

3. Born to Write: Bad Writing in the Age of AI

4. Confessions of a Former Semi-Colon Addict

5. Prompted to Death

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Would you like them tailored more for Substack, The Atlantic, Medium, or a podcast episode? Each platform leans toward a different flavor.

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One of those is good. How do I know? Because I’ve been writing since I was a kid. I learned everything I could. I read tons of books and studied styles, grammar, plots, characters, how to build story worlds. Am I obsessed with it? Do you know me? Of course I’m obsessed with it. I’m obsessed with AI too.

AI is a powerful writing assistant. It’s also an abysmal writer. It doesn’t go the edge of the writing cliff and jump. It doesn’t sail the air currents of inspiration. It can’t. It never will. The keyword in AI is artificial. The results are an artifice.

As a writing assistant it’s powerful. Research is fast, but some of it needs to be checked. It can just make stuff up. It lies. I can spot what needs to be checked because I’ve been doing this long time.

They’ve been working on the lies but they’ll never get it fixed. Why? Because the internet lies. There’s layers of disinformation. The pool is polluted.

That goes for all the AI sources. Want it to write a script? Do you know how many bad scripts are out there? Bad scriptwriting advice books? AI trains on this stuff like a Chernobyl cow chews radioactive chud. It all goes in. The good and the bad. You know what comes out.

The Dilemma

The better you write, the more suspicious people become.

I send a book into an agent now the first question out their mouth is did you write this? What the fuck! I just powered through three drafts of it noun by noun and you ask me that? Or I’m hired to ghost write for a CEO and they tell me not to use AI. Why did they hire me? Do they think the thirty-five years of accomplished writing happened with AI?

I don’t want to be a pack mule hauling a lifetime of receipts, but it’s beginning to feel like I need to bad write to be taken seriously—misspell, overly passive voice, fall back in love with adverbs, get wordy, leave out words, lose my beloved em dash.