priya hajela
763 posts
@hajelap
Author of Ladies’ Tailor, (Harper Collins India) a bunch of short stories and literary annotations.
How is it that we have bought into the manufactured myth that ageing naturally is a crime or a disease and it is the woman’s fault for allowing it to happen? newindianexpress.com/magazine/2026/… @TNIEMagazine
I submitted a draft of my short story to Claude for copy editing. Sometimes he’ll suggest a re-write of a particular sentence. My version: “She was just a rich girl, with a carelessness about her that could only come from being born into privilege.” Claude’s suggestion: “She was just a rich girl, careless in the way only privilege allows.” It's a matter of taste, but I personally think Claude's version is better. It's saying the same thing but more deftly. But when I swap his sentence in then plug the paragraph into Pangram, it goes from being high confidence that it's human to low confidence that it's human. If I keep doing this, will it start to read like AI slop? If I keep doing this, is it even my writing anymore? So I'm keeping my version, the one I think is worse, and I'm disquieted by the fact that there could be a better version of this story that I now need to specifically avoid.
Finland has solved the problem of AI use in literature, the same way it solves every problem: through unionization. You literally are not a writer in Finland if you're not part of the Union of Finnish Writers. To be considered eligible, you must have published at least two independently authored literary works in Finnish, and be "writerly" at the "artistic and professional level of your output", in other words, to have been received well by the critics and not to have misbehaved too badly at the parties. Just weeks ago, the union issued a decree stating that in the face of the proliferating use of AI in writing and related scandals abroad, no member is allowed to write without supervision: writing may only be done in the presence of at least two senior union members, and only in longhand. The policy seems to be a success in that there have been no local scandals so far, but writer responses to the rule have been varied: some say that they can't live like this, others that it's a great perk to get live feedback from senior colleagues they admire, even if it's in the form of various grunts, groans or smiles as they watch over their shoulders.
