By Guardian staff reporter
Publication Date: 2026-06-03 16:36:00
Nesrine Malik is right to worry about the impact AI could have on writing (AI is meaningless and human. That’s why her empty voice is fitting for this political moment, June 1st). The examples of fabricated quotes and unreliable research she cites should concern anyone who values truth and public trust.
However, I suspect that the deeper problem lies not in AI’s boring prose, but in its relationship to evidence. The authors who were caught out by misquotations often tried not to deceive. They believed in using AI as a research aid while maintaining editorial control. But somehow the fiction found its way into the facts. The problem was not laziness, but misplaced trust in a system that can produce plausible reconstructions without distinguishing between what is observed, what is inferred, or what is simply generated.
Malik is certainly right that an over-reliance on AI can weaken habits of thought and expression. But the greater danger is that it weakens our habit of checking where ideas come from in…
