Westworld was a disappointment. It became unwatchable after the first season. But one exchange from 2016 has aged better than anything else in that show, and it landed differently when I recalled it recently in the context of AI authorship.

A greeter robot exchanges words with William, a guest.

‘You want to ask, so ask.’

‘Are you real?’

‘Well, if you can’t tell, does it matter?‘

I thought of this after encountering a post that’s representative of a genre now doing brisk trade on LinkedIn and its satellites. The argument runs roughly thus: AI can write fast, but it can’t write you. Your why is sacred. Your scars make the prose real. The messy middle is where the magic lives. Keep the soul in your stories.

A bloke shared this opinion:

The one thing AI can’t replicate is your “Why.” 🧠

There’s a lot of noise lately about how AI can “write a book in an hour.” But after publishing 8 books, I’ve realized something crucial: speed is not the same as substance.

The “hidden danger” of letting tools do the heavy lifting isn’t just about the quality of the prose—it’s about the erosion of the creative spirit. When we skip the struggle of the “messy middle,” we skip the insights that actually make a story resonate with a reader.

Tools are great for grammar and brainstorming, but they don’t have:
The scars that make a character’s pain feel real.

The weird, specific memories that make a setting feel alive.
The intuition to know when to break the rules for emotional impact.

By all means, use the tech. But don’t let it sit in the driver’s seat. Your readers are looking for a connection with you, not a refined algorithm.

Keep the soul in your stories. It’s the only thing that actually sticks.

So much to unpack.

This sounds lovely enough. It is also almost entirely wrong, methinks.

Why is doing suspiciously grand work in these arguments. It’s treated as an ineffable essence – a soul-particle immune to replication. But why is not a substance. It’s an interpretive gloss. A post-hoc narrative we attach to action to stabilise it. Call it intention, call it telos, call it ‘creative spirit’ if one must. It remains a story we tell about stories.

And if we’re invoking the canon, let’s not do so selectively. Roland Barthes already detonated the neat alignment between authorial intention and readerly reception. Once a work leaves the desk, its why dissolves into a field of readings. The reader does not commune with your struggle. They encounter marks on a page. The rest is projection.

The romanticisation of the ‘messy middle’ borders on Calvinism – suffering as guarantor of authenticity, as though the scar itself writes the sentence. Plenty of humans have scars and produce dull prose. Plenty of writers construct convincing pain from observation, empathy, craft, and yes, occasionally from tools. Emotional resonance is not a moral reward for having bled.

Then there is the means-fetish: the idea that process sanctifies product. We do not evaluate a bridge by how spiritually formative the drafting was for the engineer. We ask whether it stands. If a text moves a reader, unsettles them, clarifies something, disturbs them – the instrument used to draft it is historically interesting, not aesthetically decisive.

There is also a quiet assumption buried in all of this: that connexion between writer and reader is a transmission of interiority. It isn’t. It is a negotiated effect. Readers connect with patterns that mirror, disrupt, or reframe their own experience. They are not sniffing for artisanal anguish.

None of this means craft evaporates. It means we should be wary of smuggling metaphysics into workflow preferences.

If someone prefers to wrestle with the blank page unaided – splendid, have at it. But the fetish for purity says more about our anxieties over authorship than it does about art. And if you can’t tell whether the thing that moved you was written by hand or by machine, then I’d suggest, with the greeter robot, that perhaps it doesn’t matter.

In the end, I am not even advocating using AI for writing, but I am saying not to be a dick about it. Enough of the virtue signalling