Not just a tool. A transformation. A turning point. AI is changing the way we work, the way we think, the way we create – quietly reshaping decisions, accelerating processes, unlocking new possibilities.

 

Why is AI voice so recognisable? There are some common motifs – the triplets, the alternating wordy sentences and short little quips. En dashes – though personally, I like them. The soft qualifiers, the over-explanations.

But there’s something about it that’s harder to define. It’s a specific voice and we recognise it immediately. It was built by analysing the entirety of the written internet alongside datasets of books known only as ‘Books1’ and ‘Books2’. The titles have never been disclosed, but they’re believed to be a mix of fan fiction, young adult and public-domain classics – the full gamut of modern and historical writing, boiled down to something that sounds like the first paragraph of this blog.

It’s confident but overly eager to please. It uses a lot of words to say very little. And it’s boring. (See your LinkedIn feed.) Somehow, the sum of all human expression ends up worse than its parts. Is this voice really the essence of us?

We collectively don’t like AI writing, design or music, but there is AI that we accept without question – spellcheck, cleaning up a blurry image, autocomplete. The Hyphen team recently sat down to talk about where the line is. What counts as cheating, and what makes the work better? Like recognising AI text without quite knowing why, most of us can feel where that that line is, but it’s hard to explain.

For us, in this moment, the line sits at authorship. We won’t use generative AI to create the work itself – whether that’s words or images. AI may get better at hiding itself, but it will always fall into a singular voice – a mash-up of everything that becomes like nothing. It doesn’t break rules or take risks. That’s the work of humans, and it’s what makes creation worthwhile.

This year, Hyphen introduced a ‘Created by Human Intelligence’ badge that will appear on every imprint page. It signals our commitment to human-led work in a world where creativity shaped by machines is becoming normal. It’s a world that George Orwell wrote about in 1984, describing book-writing machines that churn out novels in minutes. He must have imagined this as a far-fetched detail of a dystopian future, but today it feels prescient.

– Marissa Shalfi, Senior Editor