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

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authors is what I signed up for, not fighting off robots. 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.” 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.) 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...