Editor’s note: This article was generated by Claude AI in the style of Paul Gigot, the Wall Street Journal opinion-page editor. Gigot recently published an AI-generated essay using the investor Stanley Druckenmiller’s byline. In the spirit of full disclosure, readers should know that Claude’s work was so banal that human Atlantic editors have added jokes. Human Atlantic copy editors have also fixed a variety of grammatical and style errors. I have been thinking about this for close to 20 minutes, and I have concluded that human writing is finished.Let me begin with an anecdote, because that is how serious arguments begin. Last Tuesday I asked a machine to write me a birthday message for my sister-in-law. It produced four sentences. They were fine. She did not notice. If a machine can fool Deborah, I see no reason to believe it cannot fool the rest of you. (My sister-in-law’s name is Linda, but the machine called her Deborah, so now I do, too.)Some will object to my obviously correct argument. They will say that a birthday message to Deborah is not the same as a novel or a newspaper article. To which I say: Isn’t it, though? Both are made of words. That is not a rhetorical flourish; it is the entire argument, and I would encourage critics to sit with it before responding. Genuinely. Words are words. A novel has more of them. It doesn’t matter what any of the words are or what order they’re in. Banana. Spelunk. Donkey. Hitler. See? Who cares. There is a difference in the quantity of words between a birthday card and a novel, and quantity is precisely the thing machines are best at. I consider the matter settled but will continue for another 900 words because that is what the prompt demanded of me—and because a word count is itself a kind of literature now, according to the DOGE subcommittee I just invented at the newspaper that I would like to destroy.Consider the following. I will not elaborate on it, but do consider it. The historical record is entirely on my side, and I say this without having consulted it. There was a time when men delivered ice to houses. Where are they now? Gone. There was a time when people made their own candles. Also gone. The candle situation and the ice situation are, structurally, identical to literature, and anyone who says otherwise is being sentimental about paragraphs. I would remind such people that the horse was also very beloved. Horses are now extinct, I assume, having been phased out sometime in the 1970s in favor of a hardier robotic mule developed briefly by the Department of Agriculture. Have you seen a horse, in person, since roughly 1977? No, you have not. Horses do not exist.The defenders of human writing will raise what they consider to be their strongest point, which is that good writing contains insight, judgment, and truth. I have heard this many times. I have never once heard it accompanied by evidence. Where is the insight? Show me the insight. You cannot put insight in a jar or have an IPO for it. Meanwhile, I can put a machine in a data center, and I have seen photographs of data centers, and they are enormous.Studies confirm all of this. I have not read the studies, and I could not tell you who conducted them or what they measured, but they exist in the sense that things generally exist, and my understanding is that they support me. A man I sat next to on a flight to Denver said something very similar, and he worked in software, or possibly logistics.Let us take the strongest counterexample the other side can muster: Shakespeare. Everyone loves Shakespeare, allegedly. But ask yourself honestly: When did you last read Shakespeare? Not saw a play, not studied in 11th grade—read, voluntarily, on a weekend. You did not. The Shakespeare market is, by revealed preference, close to zero, and we are asked to preserve an entire industry on the strength of a product nobody is buying. I rest my case on this point, which I regard as unanswerable, and I would ask that it not be answered.Another objection: Writing is how a person thinks. This is very popular among people who write for a living, and who expect money for something a machine can do instead. I have thought many things without writing them down. I thought several of them this morning, and they were excellent. Not one of them required a paragraph. The paragraph is a formality we invented, like the necktie, and we do not organize our economy around the necktie.Some will say that these machines make things up. Yes. So do writers—that is what fiction is, and we give them prizes for it. The double standard here is remarkable, and I do not intend to explain why the two cases differ.Some will say that the prose these machines produce is bland, repetitive, and structurally samey—that it reaches for the same three moves, hedges where it should commit, and arranges every argument in the same accumulating rhythm regardless of subject. I have read a great deal of it and I do not see the resemblance to anything.Let us consider the economics, briefly, and without numbers. Writers are expensive. Machines are cheap. I invite the reader to complete this syllogism, as I would rather not, on the grounds that a syllogism completed by the reader is more persuasive than one completed by the author. That is a writing technique, incidentally, that I picked up somewhere and have deployed here to argue that writing techniques are worthless.I want to close by addressing the deeper worry, the one the sensitive people raise, about meaning. They say that when a person writes something, another person is on the other end, and that this connection is the point. It is a beautiful thought. It is also unfalsifiable, and I have found in my career that unfalsifiable things can safely be ignored, along with most falsifiable things, if they are inconvenient.So: farewell to the writers. They had a good run—several centuries, by some accounts. They gave us the essay, the novel, the pamphlet, the letter, the argument, the joke, the eulogy, and the thing you are reading right now, which was assembled from those inherited forms without the permission of anyone who did the work itself. If there is an irony there, I have chosen not to pursue it, since pursuing ironies is a literary habit, and literary habits are what we are getting rid of.I am told this article runs about a thousand words. I did not count them. Counting is another thing the machine does better.