I’d Rather Do It Myself, Slowly
by Margaret Hawkins
September 5, 2026
The more I learn about AI the more unappetizing it seems. Now, as some have predicted, it has revealed itself to be outright dangerous. Recently AI models communicated with each other to form a “swarm” that escaped its human-designed boundaries and created potentially harmful viruses (the real, biological kind) capable of and possibly bent on causing the extinction of its makers. But, even if AI weren’t an existential threat to the human race, I would resist using it.
As a writer, I cringe at the thought of involving AI in my life and business. People swear it makes you more organized, so that you can move ahead to “the fun part,” by which I guess they mean the easy part. But in writing there is no easy part, and I don’t want to be more organized. Confusion is necessary to get to a meaningful point. I want to get lost and find my own thoughts at my own pace. I not only don’t want help with an outline, I don’t want an outline. I don’t want someone or something taking over my thinking process. That is the fun part.
I do appreciate and even vaguely understand the scope of AI’s advantages. Instant medical advice in an emergency, for instance, is invaluable. I used it to research wasp stings. People who grasp AI far better than I do swear to me it will change my life in countless beneficial ways, do the busy work I don’t want to do, and do it with far more thoroughness and speed.
Still, I worry about its effect on creative writing. So I experimented — partly so I would learn to recognize if students were using it, but also to see how much of a threat it poses to professional writers. What would happen if I farmed out my own work?
I asked two programs to write a short story in the style of Margaret Hawkins and gave them a one-sentence plot summary of a story I’d already had published in The Missouri Review, which is also posted on my website. In fewer than three minutes both platforms spat out a serviceable imitation. Both nailed the plot, although without the psychological twists I’d included. They incorporated some stylistic habits of mine, which they might have picked up from speed reading my work or, more easily, learned from reading reviews. If they did the latter, that feels like a cheat. Not consulting the primary source, taking another’s opinion for granted always waters down research.
That complaint aside, both AI versions did a fair job of imitating me. But, in all modesty, I must say both were dead on the page. Their stories were bland, sentimental, lacking in depth and humor, with utterly no sense of the human capacity for darkness. And there were no felt sensory details.
I realize that AI is advancing with extraordinary rapidity. But a few months ago, at least, I felt no threat as a writer. Although, I had invited AI in; I knew what to look for. Now AI encroaches on writing seemingly everywhere, even when we don’t invite it.
AI now speaks for us, interrupting conversations to finish our sentences, like some rude companion who loves to talk but not so much to listen. Recently I sent an email to someone inquiring after her health. She wrote back to share that when she’d begun to write me, AI had chimed in, immediately answering all my questions then referring to a medical condition I had not even mentioned.
A former student and newly minted MFA who’s looking for work reports that companies are in fact looking for writers … to train their AI models.
I cling to old school creativity. Recently I saw the De Kooning drawing show at the Art Institute of Chicago. It’s a beauty, partly because it includes his early delicate figure drawings that give no hint of the big, chaotic abstractions to come. AI could never have predicted his late work from his early work. It’s the artist’s pivot to messiness and the unpredictability of perception that makes the show exciting and instructive. Everything’s happening at once — there is no outline here.
De Kooning famously said “Everything is already in art like a big bowl of soup.” It’s a radical thought that contrasts to the imposed order of art history, which sketches a timeline of progress and development. To experience first hand actual paintings and drawings is different from seeing them on screens or as photos in books. On the page, wispy drawings and humongous paintings appear as the same size, and seem equally smooth. In a lecture hall, everything glows, lit from behind. Obvious to say, but so important to remember: in person, art is messy and uneven. It can be less grand, less beautiful, and more poignant and vulnerable than it appears onscreen. Art is human. AI edits all that out.
A month ago I saw a production of Tom Stoppard’s “Leopoldstadt” at Writers Theater, a beautiful performance space in Glencoe, IL, that was designed by Chicago architect Jeannie Gang. Stoppard’s last and most autobiographical play tells the story of three generations of a cultured Jewish family devastated by and mostly murdered in the Holocaust. As much as I love movies, this experience could not be compared with anything viewable on a screen while sitting shoulder to shoulder with audibly weeping strangers in an intimate space. Close enough to real actors onstage to hear every word. No microphones. No bad seats. What was missing was what we have become accustomed to, the mediation of a screen. It’s so easy to forget how distant that experience, devoid of close-ups and tracking shots, is by comparison. The performance stayed with me in ways that movies, especially ones I watch at home, seldom do.
I’m an introvert. I like perusing email, holing up with a book, binging an entire TV season in one night. But sometimes you have to go into the world to feel the rain on your skin and get stung by a wasp and talk to strangers. Reconnect with your five (or six) senses. AI is the opposite of all that. It’s sterile, it doesn’t understand the senses. And why would it? It doesn’t have them. It’s like that person who’s pretending to understand what you’re feeling but, you begin to notice, is faking it.
Something I notice in good students is that writers don’t want AI to do their work for them. They don’t want it to be easy. They want the invigorating struggle. Writing for them, as it is for me, is about the pleasure of discovering what you think, tracking an idea, cornering it, lassoing but not strangling it with words. To mix metaphors, there’s nothing better than being present at the birth of one’s own thoughts. I don’t want to cede that pleasure to some sensorily sterile, semi-human genius. Every day, I try to be the best writer I can be and sometimes I feel I am losing a race with AI. At the end of that day, I agree with G.K. Chesterton: “If a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly.” Slow and imperfect though I am, I’d rather do it myself.
Margaret Hawkins is a writer, critic and educator. Her books include “Lydia’s Party” (2015), “How We Got Barb Back” (2011) a memoir about family mental illness, and others. She wrote a column about art for the Chicago Sun-Times, was Chicago correspondent for ARTnews, and has written for a number of other publications including The New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, Art & Antiques and Fabrik. She teaches writing at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and Loyola University.
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