Opinion: For all writers, abstaining from generative AI is the best gift you can give yourself 

If writers do not actively develop initiative, creativity, critical thinking skills, and work ethic in their teens and 20s, they likely never will, writes Lucas Aykroyd. Adobe stock image Antonioguillem - stock.adobe.com

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Although I am a journalist rather than a university professor, I know how frustrating it can be to confront a rising tide of AI-generated essays from students.

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In 2017, I founded the Irene Adler Prize, an annual $1,000 US scholarship for women writers with a free-to-enter essay competition. In 2025, I added a no-AI-use rule. It stings whenever I have to disqualify an essay that is manifestly polluted with glib, hollow phrases spewed by a large language model (LLM), like the ubiquitous “It isn’t just this, it’s that” construction. Inspiring the next generation of journalists and authors is what I signed up for, not fighting off robots.

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There is a massive cost for aspiring writers — and our future literary culture — when they ignore Sophocles’ classic principle of “rather fail with honour than succeed by fraud.”

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And “fraud” is the correct term. When you prompt ChatGPT to write a 1,000-word essay about disease imagery in Hamlet, it is essentially the same as cheating by paying an essay mill to write it for you. (Except that you are too cheap to pay.)

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If writers do not actively develop initiative, creativity, critical thinking skills, and work ethic in their teens and 20s, they likely never will. Recent studies by the MIT Media Lab and SBS Swiss Business School link LLM use to a decline in cognitive abilities. It is the unsurprising next step down the road after the widespread adoption of smartphones left many users unable to remember phone numbers or concentrate long enough to read a novel — abilities that were once the norm.

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As for my established writer colleagues who say, “I use generative AI strategically and sparingly as a tool,” I congratulate them on snorting a small amount of cocaine rather than the whole mountain like Al Pacino in Scarface.

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I urge all writers to not swallow the notion that you must either adopt AI or get left behind. This only serves the tech oligarchs. It is demonstrably false.

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My specialties are travel and sports journalism. In the last year, without using generative AI as my guide, I have travelled on assignment to Antarctica, Australia, Japan, and the Milan Olympics, and written for magazines such as Canadian Geographic and Western Living.

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However, professional credits are not the only measure of success. It is also about staying mentally sharp.

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I have a plug-in on my laptop to block Google’s AI overviews. I also use a smartphone only when necessary. When my phone died near Tokyo’s gargantuan Shinjuku Station, I was able to reverse-engineer the half-hour subway trip back to my hotel by recalling station names and following English-language signs.

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Avoiding LLMs forces your brain to work harder. That in turn will make you a better writer. An additional benefit is not having to worry about embarrassing yourself by publishing confident-sounding AI hallucinations under your name. Reading as little LLM-generated writing as possible, too, can help you avoid contaminating your personal style. Quality writing wins out.