FICTION WITH HELP FROM AI:
1.
Dale Pruitt, 56, preaches twenty-two minutes at the eleven o’clock service, and the elders tell him this is the best year of preaching in his twenty-nine.
Saturday at nine he sits in the study with the Barclay commentaries open on the desk and the laptop open on his knees. He types the passage, Luke 15, and his notes from Tuesday, and asks for three ways to structure it. The first is a sermon he has heard four times. The third is a sermon nobody should preach. The second has a turn in it he has never made, from the father running down the road to the older son doing arithmetic in the field, and he takes the turn and builds his own stairs under it. By midnight he has rewritten most of the words. The illustration about the mechanic who would not forgive his brother is his, from a man he buried in 2019.
Sunday a woman takes his hand at the door and says the Lord spoke through him this morning. He says thank you. He believes her and he believes himself, and he does not examine how both fit in one chest.
At the board meeting in April a young elder asks with his phone face down on the table. “Do you use the AI, pastor?”
“Like a concordance,” Dale says. “For the Greek.”
“Good,” the elder says. “Some people here would have a problem with it.”
“They would,” Dale says, and moves the meeting to the parking lot resurfacing.
2.
Marina Delgado, 38, charges twenty-two cents a word and keeps a small blue badge on her site that reads Human Written. The badge costs eighty dollars a year from a company in Austin that verifies nothing.
Her method: she feeds the brief, the client’s style guide, and the three strongest pieces from the client’s archive, and asks for an outline and a mediocre draft. The draft is mediocre. She takes the outline, throws out eighty percent of the sentences, and writes over the rest. Two hours later the piece would pass any test she can think of. It used to take six hours. She bills six, because she bid the project and not the hour.
In March a software client sends a new vendor agreement with an attestation clause. No generative AI in any deliverable. Breach means clawback of all fees paid. Marina reads it twice, signs it, and returns it as a PDF. Her daughter’s preschool costs two thousand a month. Her closest competitor works out of Manila for six cents a word, does what Marina does, faster, and signs the same page.
“I’d never use it for the writing,” she tells the client’s marketing director on the Thursday call. The director says she appreciates that, she really does, the brand voice is everything. The director’s own emails come out of a tool her company licensed in January. So does the deck on the screen between them. Neither woman mentions either thing, and the call ends four minutes early, and both of them say this was great.
3.
A conference room on the fourth floor of a humanities building, twelve faculty, one dean, and a policy draft in front of everyone stating that unauthorized use of generative artificial intelligence constitutes academic dishonesty and may result in suspension.
The dean has been explaining the detection vendor. Ninety-eight percent accurate, the vendor says.
Priya Raghunathan, associate professor, third year on this committee, puts down her pen. “Show of hands. Who wrote every word of his last recommendation letter?”
Nobody moves.
“Mine either. I wrote nine in October. I gave it the CV and my notes and it gave me a first pass and I fixed it and I signed it. Every sentence in those letters is true. I stand behind all of them. And on Monday I get to fail a nineteen-year-old for a smaller version of what I did in October. The difference between him and me is that I have a chair and he has a hearing.”
A man from classics says the two cases are different, and his reason is a real one. The student is assessed on the process. She is assessed on the outcome.
“Yes,” Priya says. “Who decided which of us gets assessed on process?”
From the end of the table, a lecturer who is not on the committee and came in for the coffee: “I teach four sections of composition at two campuses for forty-one thousand dollars a year. Four hundred and eighty essays a semester. You want to know how I get comments back inside a week.”
Nobody answers him.
The policy passes eleven to one. In August it appears in every syllabus in the college, in a standard paragraph most of the faculty paste without reading, drafted from a template the dean’s office produced in ninety seconds.
4.
Owen Vance, 19, has never written a school paper in a world where the machine was not sitting there.
He has worked out rules, and he did work them out, on a server with four hundred members who trade them the way earlier students traded old exams. Never paste. The version history in a Google Doc shows two thousand words landing in one block at 11:52 p.m., and that block has ended people. So type it, or run the extension that types it for you at ninety words a minute with pauses for thinking. Ask for a C-plus draft, because the A draft reads like nobody alive. Keep three of your own weak sentences per page. Leave one comma splice. Cite one source the machine cannot reach, something from the microfilm in the basement of the library, because a real page number in a 1974 issue of a journal nobody has digitized ends every conversation before it starts.
In seminar he says he uses it to brainstorm. The professor nods and says that is a legitimate use, that is what these tools are good for. Owen means about eleven percent of what he said.
He gets a 91 on the Melville paper. The comment says his close reading of the whiteness of the whale shows a real ear for the text. He reads it twice and feels something he has no word for, sitting close to pride and not the same.
5.
Hana Kim, 20, writes formal English because she learned it from textbooks and her mother’s red pen, and formal English reads as machine. The detector returns 87 percent on her Latin American history paper.
The hearing takes place at a laminate table with a box of tissues already on it, which tells her what these rooms are used to. She explains her drafting habits. She explains that she outlines on paper first. The associate dean is kind and asks whether she can prove it, and Hana understands that she has been asked to prove a negative to a number.
She keeps her grade after two weeks and one letter from her academic advisor. Since February she records her screen while she writes, every session, four hours of footage per essay, stored in a folder on her drive named Evidence. She has never once used the tool. Around half her friends use it every week.
She has stopped saying that she does not use it, because the sentence has been ruined. Everyone says it now. She hears her own voice saying it and hears the lie in it that is not hers.
6.
Ray Ocampo, 47, composites for a vendor shop in Culver City that has three floors, no signage, and a nondisclosure agreement running eleven pages. His client this quarter is a studio with a press release taped to the breakroom fridge announcing its lawsuit against an AI company for the unauthorized use of copyrighted material. Somebody drew a smiley face on it in January and nobody has taken it down.
His week: cleaning generated crowd extension for a battle sequence, a hundred and forty extras turned into eleven thousand, then a pass to fix hands and repair the edges where the machine loses interest. The shot list calls the work environment augmentation. The call sheet says nothing. The credit roll will say the name of the shop.
At the mixer in June a union rep he likes asks what they are running over there.
“Traditional comp, mostly,” Ray says. “Some machine-learning assist on the roto.”
That sentence was written in a conference room by a man in a quarter-zip and distributed to the floor as guidance. Ray has said it eleven times and it comes out smooth now. He has a mortgage in Sherman Oaks and a son starting at Cal State Northridge in the fall. His friend Teo, who told the same shop no in 2025 on principle, drives for a grocery delivery app and posts about integrity on Sundays, and Ray likes those posts, every one of them, from his phone in the parking lot.
7.
Bill Ferraro, 51, sits at his father’s kitchen table at two in the morning. The funeral is at ten. On the paper napkin in front of him he has written three lines in four hours: the 1962 Impala, second shift at the plant for thirty-one years, he paid for the wedding and never said one word about love.
He opens the laptop and types those three things and everything else he can remember, unsorted, eight hundred words, the fight about the truck, the smell of the garage, the way his father sat in the car in the driveway for ten minutes before coming in. He asks how to put it in order.
What comes back has one sentence in it he keeps, about a man who said what he meant with money and time because the other words were not given to him. The order of the paragraphs is not his. Everything else at the funeral is his, in his throat, in front of two hundred people at St. Anthony’s.
His sister holds his arm in the vestibule afterward and asks how he did that.
“I don’t know,” Bill says. “It just came.”
That night at the hotel he deletes the conversation from his history. He cannot say why he does it. He meant every word he said over his father’s coffin, and he knows he meant it, and he deletes it anyway before he sleeps.
8.
Corinne Whately, 34, illustrator, eleven years freelance, posts a process video in September because she is proud of the piece and because she believes in showing the work. In the video she says she generated a rough for the perspective on the cathedral interior, printed it, and painted the final in gouache over four days.
Twelve hours later the repost has forty thousand quotes. The anthology drops her piece on a Thursday. The gallery in Portland uses the word postpone. Her income falls sixty percent over the next quarter, and two commercial clients who never explain anything stop explaining anything.
Two of the accounts loudest in her mentions use the same tool she used. She knows their line work. She has known it since 2019. She says nothing, because saying it would confirm to everyone watching that she is the kind of person who thinks about this.
Her friends take one lesson from what happened to her, and the lesson is not about tools. The illustrators she knows still use what they use. They no longer make videos.
Devin Osei, 33, staff engineer, tells his father at Thanksgiving that it is basically autocomplete. Sixty-two percent of the lines he shipped in the last quarter arrived as suggestions he accepted, and he read every one of them, and he rejected plenty, and he would tell you the reading is the job now.
His VP shows the board a slide claiming a forty percent lift in engineering throughput, a number produced by a director who needed a number.
Sales tells the bank, whose vendor policy forbids third-party generative tools in any delivered code, that every line is written and reviewed by their engineers. The second half of that sentence holds. The bank’s own chief technology officer wrote the vendor policy in a tool his team has not finished approving, and he was pleased with how quickly it came together, and he mentioned that to no one.
The concealment is old. Speechwriters put words in mouths and the mouths took the credit. Ghostwriters delivered the memoirs of generals. Session players cut the records the band toured behind, and the sleeve said the band. Script doctors saved pictures and went uncredited by contract. Erving Goffman (1922-1982) described the back region as the place where the work of the performance gets done and out of which the audience is kept, and he noticed that audiences cooperate. They stay out. Nobody at dinner asks the host who cooked.
What has changed is the volume, the speed, and who gets asked. Priya signs nine letters and answers to nobody. Owen answers to a detector. Marina signs an attestation her client’s own marketing department violates on Tuesdays. Hana, who has done nothing, keeps four hours of video per essay in a folder called Evidence, and Corinne, who said out loud what half her field does in silence, lost a quarter of her year for it. The disclosure falls on the ones least able to refuse it. The rules get written by people using the tool to write them.
There is a case for the silence, and Dale Pruitt could make it. The mechanic in the sermon was his. Bill Ferraro’s love for his father was his. No man owes the room an itemized list of what sat on his desk while he worked, and the reader who wants to know what a thing cost to make is asking a question about himself.
There is a case against the silence, and Hana Kim could make it, and the buyer who paid twenty-two cents a word could make it, and the union rep at the mixer in June could make it if anyone told him what to ask.
Everyone in these scenes gives an account of his use, and every account runs shorter than the use. The gap is where the work got done. Nobody has agreed yet on whose business the gap is, and until that is settled, the people in it will keep giving the short account, because so far the short account is the one that gets you through the door.
