Editor’s note: This article was generated by Claude AI in the style of Paul Gigot, the Wall Street Journal opinion-page editor. Gigot recently published an AI-generated essay using the investor Stanley Druckenmiller’s byline. In the spirit of full disclosure, readers should know that Claude’s work was so banal that human Atlantic editors have added jokes. Human Atlantic copy editors have also fixed a variety of grammatical and style errors.

I have been thinking about this for close to 20 minutes, and I have concluded that human writing is finished.

Let me begin with an anecdote, because that is how serious arguments begin. Last Tuesday I asked a machine to write me a birthday message for my sister-in-law. It produced four sentences. They were fine. She did not notice. If a machine can fool Deborah, I see no reason to believe it cannot fool the rest of you. (My sister-in-law’s name is Linda, but the machine called her Deborah, so now I do, too.)

Some will object to my obviously correct argument. They will say that a birthday message to Deborah is not the same as a novel or a newspaper article. To which I say: Isn’t it, though? Both are made of words. That is not a rhetorical flourish; it is the entire argument, and I would encourage critics to sit with it before responding. Genuinely. Words are words. A novel has more of them. It doesn’t matter what any of the words are or what order they’re in. Banana. Spelunk. Donkey. Hitler. See? Who cares. There is a difference in the quantity of words between a birthday card and a novel, and quantity is precisely the thing machines are best at. I consider the matter settled but will continue for another 900 words because that is what the prompt demanded of me—and because a word count is itself a kind of literature now, according to the DOGE subcommittee I just invented at the newspaper that I would like to destroy.