The World Behind the Words · Issue 31 · Written without AI
About this piece. This is a third public page on the Issue 31 record. It was written without AI aside from four mechanical fixes, locked 2026-10-03 PT: even thought to even though; Saunder’s to Saunders’s; Sanders to Saunders; patiently to potentially. Voice otherwise unchanged. It is not a preamble to the author essay, and it was not an input the machine companion saw. The machine seed was the Model Behavior interview only. The public page is George Saunders has a point - and it hurts. This page remains the record of the four mechanical fixes. No audio companion yet. The opening line above is the locked text’s first line. The paragraphs below are the rest, unchanged.
This hit hard. My goal was, and still is, learning to write well with AI. Why with AI instead of without? In the same way most of us will never train to be Olympic athletes, many of us, for good and bad reason, will never invest the raw effort required to become competent writers, much less extraordinary writers like George Saunders.
Attempting to wrestle fuzzy intuition into clarity takes way too much time and effort in this moment, but the potential benefits of competent communication remain, and AI presents a way for non-writers to communicate well, or at least better.
And while it seems highly unlikely that the quality of AI enhanced writing and the human connection that ensues will ever approach anything close to George Saunders’s pen, the potential value of lifting more writers into the realm of legibility is enormous, potentially life changing, and shouldn’t be overlooked.
And so, even though it will almost certainly inhibit the development of writing skills, my attempts to write with AI will continue because it looks like the best option given time & energy constraints. Moreover, while Saunders does not seem impressed, AI does allow those of us with, perhaps, less well-developed cortices to instantly glimpse a larger slice of reality and stronger counter arguments.
At the same time, throwing George Saunders completely under the bus seems unwise, so future issues will include something, even if only a sentence or a first draft, untouched by AI - perhaps with the exception of spelling, grammar, organization, and formatting assistance available before the age of AI.
Hopefully, some exposure to the struggle of unaided human writing does improve thinking.
Where this sits. Signal & Noise stands behind the author essay, George Saunders Is Right About Writing. He May Be Wrong About the Rest of Us. This page is not that essay and not the machine companion. The published audit is the inspection surface for the two freezes. This piece was outside that claim check.