Poetic AI prose is actually horror when you think about it.

 Once you see it you can't unsee it. 

Everyone is afraid of Pangram these days and wondering whether their prose seems like it was written by AI. You all have heard the usual tells. Em dashes. Not X, but Y. Delve. Tapestries. Intricate. Whatnot. Those aren’t the tells of AI-written text these days.

How do I know? I tried it. I use AI in my free time and at work (I am an occupational health doctor doing workplace hazard audits) for different tasks, but more on that later. It does not write my prose for me, though, because it is BAD. As Horowitz put it, we humans are better, and I am better, even though my grammar sometimes disagrees.

Except now I let it write for me.

Here is an example of how AI writes. I may have edited it a bit.

Can you guess what parts are mine?

The Silence Between Us

The storm raged outside, rain lashing against the windows, the desperate fingers of a thousand forgotten ghosts scraping the glass. The house groaned under the pressure of the moment, its ancient wooden bones protesting against the wind. The air hung thick and heavy, carrying the scent of damp earth, woodsmoke, and the sharp, sour tang of something almost resembling regret.

“You have to move out,” she said, her voice steady, her heart steady. Not with anger, but with the quiet resolve of someone who had long since accepted the inevitable.

The silence stretched between them, sharp and heavy, as if the very walls were holding their breath. The haunting howling of the wind whispered in the house.

Something resembling shame flickered across his face. His eyes dropped to the floor, his shoulders sagging beneath the weight of words left unspoken.

Then something shifted in his face. Something resembling a decision passed across his eyes.

Not shame anymore, but something darker. Something sharper.

Rage.

His jaw tightened. His eyes hardened. His hand curled into a fist, fingers digging into his palm with a force that threatened to draw blood. His knuckles turned white, trembling with the weight of emotions he could no longer contain.

“You can’t just throw me away,” he said, his voice low and sharp, yet somehow steady too.

Outside, thunder cracked, splitting the night like a wound that refused to heal. The child hiding under the table flinched, somehow knowing how this would end.

Her eyes were fixed on him, gaze unwavering, yet something resembling fear was filling her heart.

“I already have.”

The words hung between them, heavy with the weight of everything they had been and everything they would never become.

For a moment, neither moved. The silence cut through the room like a blade.

Then his eyes flickered toward the hallway, where the corridor stretched into darkness, as if inviting him toward a future he had never imagined.

Something shifted inside him again. Not an emotion, but a bowel movement that caused him to pass a horrible gas, the sour tang of yesterday’s egg salad filling the air.

The moment stretched, and somewhere deep within the walls, the house choked under the pressure of the acrid scent, and started to mutter under its breath about best-before dates of food. The ghostly fingers outside dug into the glass as if desperately clawing their way in, yearning for the warm spark of the living.

She held her breath and saw his face flicker again between emotions, like a broken television screen trying to find the right channel. The floor underneath them groaned, as if warning her to leave. Then, his fist launched itself to her throat, blood dripping from the severed wrist, leaving crimson stains on the white boards, like a scarlet letter of sins never atoned.

The fingers wrapped themselves around her neck with deliberate slowness, almost as if trying to be gentle in their murderous deed. His eyes moved to the amputated limb, horror flickering in his face instead of rage, as his eyeballs jumped out of his skull and glued themselves to the bleeding stump, life draining out of him in scarlet jets with each beat of his heart. The child’s gaze was fixed on his father’s wildly flickering face, and the child collapsed into an epileptic seizure, shaking uncontrollably under the table, the horror pushing him into the abandon of a tonic-clonic seizure that would end his life.

Her hands reached out to her child in desperation, floating in the air, as her husband’s fingers slowly squeezed the life out of her eyes, eyes that were rolling on the floor like two marbles.

The fingers stopped scratching the window. They had gotten what they wanted.

A life. Three lives.

The end.