Is AI Changing How We Write, or How We Read?

I was in Junior Secondary School when my English teacher told me the rule of a comma coming before “and”. For many years, the knowledge in my head was that a comma is used when mentioning more than two things, and “and” is used when mentioning just two things. For instance, “Lola, Titi and Wale.” I never knew you could still use a comma even before the “and” in that phrase until my English teacher. Although he mentioned that you could only use a comma before “and” when mentioning more than three things. As a writer, I have since bent this rule however it suits the style of my writing. I have used a comma to separate two things without using “and”, and I have used “and” to separate three things.

Roughly four years ago, when conversations around AI began to be a topic of interest, the major fear was how it would unseat people from their jobs. Writers, journalists, designers and other concerned fields feared AI would render them useless when their services could easily be solved by a prompt. To survive, experts advised that everyone should embrace AI to work for them, rather than fearing it would take over their jobs. So journalists, researchers, designers and others started efficiently adopting AI to improve the quality of their work and to work faster. It has now almost become a sin if you don’t embrace AI.

Of course, there are many abuses which can be easily spotted by whoever is familiar with it. As a writer, I am familiar with writing tools like ChatGPT and others that, from a first read, I could spot AI-written content. There is a difference between an AI-developed and AI-written piece. Many forget that AI is not meant to do the work for them, but to aid their work.

However, no one knew AI would influence people so much that it would be trusted to do the work for them. As an editor, I receive emails that are outrightly AI-written. We now live in a time where it has become difficult for people to construct emails. Instead of boosting creativity, it seems to be reducing people’s ability to think. Beyond this, AI writing has now become so saturated that it is difficult to distinguish between an article written by AI and one written by a human. It has become so mainstream that when basic writing rules are adopted in a piece, it is assumed to be AI-written.

The first categorisation was the assumption that any article with lots of em-dashes was written by AI. While that might be true, it is an unfair generalisation because, before AI, the em-dash had always existed, and great writers sprinkled it all around their writing. Recently on X, a user mentioned that using the rule of three in writing makes it AI-written. When my English teacher was teaching comma placement in 2013, AI had not been a thing.

What we forget is that AI did not invent the rules of writing; humans did, and humans fed those rules into it. The only difference is that AI is a machine: it is always one-directional, without intention and imagination — the very things that make writing human. We cannot generally say that an article is AI-generated just because it follows a pattern. It can be suggestive, of course, but it is not absolute.

When we start to generalise that certain patterns or rules in writing belong to AI, we risk forgetting that they were human inventions long before machines learned them. To say an em-dash or the rule of three is “AI writing” is almost like handing over centuries of human creativity to a tool that can only mirror what we feed it. If that’s the path we want, then we might as well leave AI to do all the work. We should learn how to use AI to sharpen our craft, not replace it. Because at the end of the day, writing only stays alive when humans continue to shape it with choice, intent, and style.

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