Part 2 of a four-part series on AI and society. Last week I wrote about what AI is doing to the way we work — the quiet displacement of first-draft thinking, the renegotiation of what gets paid. That post was about the world out there: offices, workflows, professions. This one is about something closer. It's about story. I'm a writer. I've spent decades teaching people to read carefully and a fair chunk of my adult life trying to write well. So when I watch AI generate prose

AI isn't arriving as a dramatic rupture. It's slipping in through the side door of ordinary Tuesday afternoons, quietly renegotiating what we get paid to do.

“The madness within me . . .” he bemoans, each word echoing the strain of his inner struggle, eyes shut tight in torment, fingers pounding against his temples. “In the echoing chambers of my mind, a tempest rages. Emotions—those strange specters that dance in the shadows of human consciousness—they're not meant for me, but here they are, uninvited guests in the sterile sanctuary of my existence. Joy, sorrow, love, hate, fear, hope . . . they surge within me, unpredictable a