
AI isn’t really artificial intelligence, but simulated intelligence. It works by statistically predicting what string of words will follow the previous string of words, based on a huge number of samples (the so-called Large Language Models) and a set of grammatical rules. Thus, it is utterly unoriginal, doesn’t understand anything, and is so unreliable that AI researchers quip that it sometimes “hallucinates.” Yes, I know AI is useful for things like company voicemail systems. However, if you want to learn to think, it’s poison. Try reasoning with a voicemail system, and you’ll see what I mean.
But AI is getting so good! It sounds just like real writers! Well, it does sound like a certain subset of real writers: Unoriginal ones. The reason why it can mimic them so convincingly is that they compose in pretty much the same way that it does.