Sportswriting legend Red Smith once said that writing a column is easy: “All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.” In 2026, though, no blood is required. All you do is sit down at a laptop and have Claude or ChatGPT write the story for you. That seems to be the takeaway from a cluster of reports from the journalistic front of late. Last month, my colleague Maxwell Zeff wrote about writers who unapologetically generate at least some of their prose via unbylined AI collaborators. The star of his piece was Alex Heath, a tech reporter who said he routinely has AI write drafts based on his notes, interview transcripts, and emails. That same week, The Wall Street Journal profiled Fortune reporter Nick Lichtenberg, who explained to the paper that he leans heavily on AI to churn out his work. He has written 600 stories since July; on one day this past February, he had seven bylines. Ever since reading these reports—thankfully produced by the human hand—I have been having trouble sleeping. Until recently, the consensus had been that using large language models to actually create commercial prose was verboten. Many publications, including WIRED, have firm guidelines against AI-generated text. We don’t use it for editing, either, which is a less alarming, though still troublesome practice of several others cited in Zeff’s column. The book publishing world, trying to protect itself from an avalanche of self-published slop, is still policing its catalog; Hachette Book Group recently retracted a novel that had apparently relied too much on the output of an LLM. But as the models turn out prose that is becoming increasingly harder to distinguish from human outputs, the convenience and cost savings of using AI for the difficult job of writing are threatening to seep into the mainstream. The walls are starting to crumble. As one might expect, a lot of people were unhappy to read about this development, particularly those like me whose keyboards are dripping with blood. B